Practical CM Reporting & Analytics
community management, health metrics, reporting
In November 2024, I joined NTP NS (Science and Technology Park, Novi Sad, Serbia). I think this can be considered the beginning of the project.
Why did I decide to launch the project?
The community management software industry is estimated at over $6.7 billion. According to the same estimate, this figure will almost triple in the next ten years. Community management software today consists mainly of various forum or chat engines and automatic content publishing systems. At the same time, there are practically no analytical tools on the market that could help community managers in the most important thing - building a community. For example, there are no tools to identify users who are more likely to cause drama or users who will leave the community forever if not contacted, there is no way to easily identify fake accounts, etc. There are also no tools for community analytics and reporting. Each CM calculates MAU, Stickiness, and ROI on their own (or simply does not do it at all).
Well, something should already exist, right? — you ask. Yes, of course. Here are some projects that solve a similar problem:
Common Room is a great project, but it is designed for finding leads for sales, not for building a community. Ideologically, making it a tool for CMs would be extremely difficult. Sprout Social helps track social networks. Two main tools are Social Listening and scheduled posting. In general, this is a marketers' tool. Talkbase is very similar to what is needed, at the same time, it is a project without a specific focus, and as a result, in my opinion, provides a minimum of real added value (and at the moment of publishing this post is about to close).
In other words, we live in a unique time of big opportunities =)
What is the essence of Practical CM App?
Briefly, I want to make building online communities more efficient by having managers make more efficient decisions. Thus, the product I am working on helps make efficient decisions. I wrote about this in detail in another post.
3 Comments
Great vision. Friendly suggestion: pick one customer type, for example a mid sized Discord community, and one outcome to own, reducing churn. Build a small loop that flags at risk members and suggests the next action in Slack or Discord, track 30 day retention and incident count, and run an eight week pilot with ten communities priced by size.
Interesting project and I think you are right about the gap. Most tools today lean toward marketing or sales and leave actual community health as an afterthought. Having analytics that point out at risk members or potential problems before they blow up sounds genuinely useful. Curious, how are you planning to validate the first version with real community managers?
I am contacting CMs privatly and suggesting them to use the service. We still have no real customers, we've released the first version a few weeks ago.
PS I used to work as a community manager at Stack Overflow for almost a decade. I think we should not be very far the real problem. But you're right, we are working on verifying it.