Just as health in our bodies can be broken down into a set of core categories, such as heart health, nutrition, and mental health, community health in digital communities can be understood as a set of pillars. For each pillar, we can determine related performance indicators. By measuring these indicators, we can understand and track changes in overall community health.
Learn how to measure something as elusive as community health.
1. Mutual interest
Performance indicators of mutual interest include looking for indicators of shared connection.
- Look for: Micro-communities that form around specific aspects of the digital space and avenues for community members to get together and participate in online events.
- Consider tracking: Forums, message boards, and other spaces the community uses to talk about their shared interests can provide data.
2. Mutual respect
Performance indicators of mutual respect include looking for evidence of a diverse community and a qualitative sense of inclusion and belonging.
- Look for: People being their authentic selves, without fear of being bullied.
- Consider tracking: Audience metrics, specifically how / whether the community includes a wide variety of people including players from different backgrounds, geographies, ethnicities, sexual orientations, and genders.
3. Psychological safety
Performance indicators of psychological safety mirror those of mutual respect.
- Look for: Communities that allow for creativity and / or flexibility among the members of the community and content creators. A healthy community will allow this creativity to thrive because members won’t be afraid to try something new or different.
- Consider tracking: Engagement in activities outside of the core game loop, ways players find of expressing themselves in-game, and engagement with user generated content (UGC) in inclusive ways (and lack of UGC being used in exclusionary ways).
Psychological safety is a sense of security that encourages players to fully engage with a game and its community.
4. Willingness to help and support (aka trust)
Performance indicators of willingness to help and support include looking for evidence that individuals engage in social connectedness activities.
- Look for: Presence of guilds / clans and grouping and thriving mentor systems.
- Consider tracking: Participation rates.
Trust is the invisible glue that holds thriving communities together.
5. Community investment
Performance indicators of community investment include looking for evidence of help and support.
- Look for: Communities where the members are willing to spend resources such as time and money.
- Consider tracking: How investments not only improve the player’s own pleasure and time in the environment but also benefit others in the community.
6. Community influence
Performance indicators of community influence include looking for evidence of positive AND negative behaviors.
- Look for: Consequences and incentives.
- Consider tracking: How players show appreciation, including rewards for good behavior, as well as respond to poor behavior, including responses by both the company and community members.
7. Community resilience
Performance indicators of community resilience mirror those of community influence.
- Look for: Ways the community repels bad actors when they appear.
- Consider tracking: Instances of members standing up for others, avoidance of negative players, and / or using tools such as reporting, muting, and blocking.
Learn how to measure something as elusive as community health.
Measuring indicators
To craft measurements of indicators, identify the signals the indicator leaves in the environment when the system is successful and also when things may be going wrong.
For example, the flowchart below maps out how you might measure Pillar #4: Willingness to help / support each other. It breaks down both success and warning signals and includes both quantitative and qualitative indicators.
Both quantitative and qualitative methods can, and ideally should, be used:
- Quantitative methods are great for telling you how much something happens, how often it happens, or what percentage of the player population is affected by something.
- Qualitative methods are great for telling you why people are doing something. To shape community health, we need to understand the motivations behind the actions.
In limited circumstances, you can make a hypothesis about behavior and experiment with changes to see how they shift telemetry, but using qualitative data for these questions are more likely to get you the answer. But keep in mind — people tend to be really bad at predicting, estimating, or remembering how much or how often they did something or experienced something.
Setting key performance indicators
Once you’ve determined the pillars you want to track, identified signals of success and challenge, and determined quantitative and / or qualitative ways to track this indicator, you may want to set targets or Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Articulating KPIs can help you see how community health is evolving over time. This can be particularly important as new features or changes to current features are implemented.
For instance, using the example above, you might set targets such as “increase the percentage of veteran players by 2% or increase satisfaction by mentees by 20%” to measure performance over time.
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