How to engage your community to uncover success metrics

If you’re unsure about how to engage your community to reveal information that you can measure, here are a few ideas.

Ask the right questions

When in doubt, you can always go back to asking the different stakeholders these basic questions to understand what makes them tick.

What does a “successful” community look like for you?
How can this success be measured?
What is the real value for you in this community?
Who should define the success of this community?

Engage in dialogue with your community stakeholders

Be sure to talk to relevant members of your community to get their ideas and feedback. This can be done through face-to-face interviews, polls, or focus group discussions. Key stakeholders to include in your research include:

Your fellow community developers
Members with leadership roles or responsibilities in the community
Members who are actively engaged
Members who are no longer actively engaged
Board members, partners, and funders

This sample will ensure that you cover all your bases and acquire a healthy mix of perspectives on what success in the community should look like. At the same time, you must always remember that while inclusion is important, not everyone in your community sees goals and success in the same way and may not speak the same language when asked to describe the community’s programmes and initiatives. Your job, then, is to act as a translator between all parties.