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Community Objectives

Open Social
Open Social Open Social • 9 August 2018

Community Objectives

 

Now that you have your goals, you need to determine what the community members should be doing on your platform to achieve those goals. In this section, we will be defining the objectives of your community. And again, make it measurable! 


Let’s stick to the example from the previous section, where your community goal was to reduce x amount of customer service costs. Some objectives for this goal could be:

  • Members should ask questions in the community
  • Members should respond to questions asked in the community.

 

Objectives should also be clear and measurable. This also demonstrates that you might need to come up with different objectives for various target audiences. One type of member should be doing one thing (asking questions), while other types should be doing another (answering them).

 

In this case (and most others), both types of members can’t live without the other. Therefore, segmenting your members and creating objectives per segment can help determine your tactics later on that will encourage members to fulfill your objectives. 

 

But how do you segment your audience? A target audience is most often defined/segmented based on the activity of a user or the level of experience the members have. So, for example: newcomers, regular users, leaders or top contributors.

 

Let’s do a short recap: every goal needs defined objectives. To be accurate, it’s best to divide your members into segments and define the objectives per segment. There’s one last step to cover:

 

The objectives need to be measurable and follow the SMART rules we covered above!  This is to help you determine whether you are reaching your ultimate goal. Here are some example of measurable objectives for a community: 

  • 75 % of the raised questions by regulars or newcomers should be answered within 5 days by the community.
  • Top contributors should answer 5 questions a month.

 

Open Social has a few functionalities that help you measure user actions and activity. See Community Health Analytics and the user export.