Documentation

Activities are the different things that the members in your community do. They are added automatically to a member profile via integrations but can also be added manually.

Activities performed by members are how we help build a picture of your community and their engagement. A member profile without any activity is a pretty bland place, but since most members in your workspace are created via integrations, there are likely only a few profiles that don’t have at least one activity.

When a user sends a message in a Discord channel, that’s an activity. If they comment on a YouTube video, that’s an activity too. Anything that the user does in relation to their participation in your community can be considered an activity.

Check out the Where do activities come from? section below for more information about how activities get into your workspace.

If you, or a colleague, send a Twitter DM to a member, this is not an activity. Why? Because it was performed by you as an action on that member, rather than something the member did themselves.

Work that you and your team do inside Orbit are considered Actions. We display those in a separate tab on the member profile so you can keep track of them.

Every activity that Orbit receives is given a weight. You can also think of this as a level of importance placed on that particular activity and how it relates to your community programme.

Orbit uses these weights, along with the frequency that an activity is performed as part of the calculations we do for the Orbit Model, which is our way of determining different levels of engagement for your community members.

Read more about the Orbit Model.

There are three ways to add activities to a member in Orbit:

Whether you’re using Twitter, Discord, GitHub or YouTube, our official integrations all create activities as well as members in your workspace.

The amount of activities captured and created differs depending on the integration, but you can get insight into exactly what they are at the top of each integration page in our documentation.

It is possible to create custom activities, such as product signups, or event attendance, for example via our API (and other tools such as Zapier, Make, or Pipedream).

In order to use activities with your custom integration effectively, we recommend that you create your Activity Types in advance.

Read more about Activity Types & Weights.

You can manually add custom activities to a member in Orbit if they have been set up in advance in your Activity Types.

Manual activity addition can be done from a few different places in the Orbit workspace:

Read more about adding activities to members.

Activity types are a way to differentiate between different activities that a member of your community might do during their journey with you.

For example, in Discord, joining a server is an activity type, but sending a message is a different activity type, as is starting a thread.

Those three activity types don’t all mean the same thing, so Orbit needs a way to differentiate between their different levels of importance. We do this by assigning each activity type a weight.

Whether you are creating a custom activity type, or it’s an activity type that comes as standard with one of our integrations, they all have weights, and those weights can be customized to suit your community and what’s important to you.

Read more about Activity Types & Weights.

Activities appear in a few different places in Orbit.

The main place to find activities from every member and of every type is via the Activities tab in your Workspace.

There you can see all the latest activity of every type, by any member. By default you’ll be shown the latest activities that have been added to your workspace, and the member that performed that activity.

You can use the filters on this page to customize the view and quickly create visualizations of that filtered data.

Any time you click on a member’s name in Orbit, a preview of their full profile will appear on the right. This preview contains lots of information, including a recent look at the activities performed by that member.

The Orbit Member profile is the home for all of the information we have about a particular member in your community, including the activities they have done.

You can use the Filter on this page to drill down to specific activities, performed by that member, on an integration by integration basis.

Activities that come from integrations are automatically added to member profiles. If there are activities that you want to add manually to member profiles (like Event RSVPs or a 1:1 Zoom chat), you can do in a few ways.

Follow the article here for more info:

If you need to add an activity to multiple members (e.g. you ran an event and want to add an activity to all event attendees), you can do the following:

You can also consider importing activities via CSV:

If you’re looking to automatically add activities to your member profiles that are not included in a built-in Orbit integration, you have a few options: