I'm a few weeks post mat-leave now and things are ramping up. I'm still enjoying plenty of white space on my calendar though. The only recurring meetings on my calendar right now are my masterminds.
I am in a few (including our Affinity client mastermind), and all of them are full of community builders.
Lately, member dashboards keep coming up in every conversation. We're all building custom dashboards (one of the best use cases I've seen for AI in membership businesses), and we're fielding questions about what kind of data is worth tracking.
If you want to grow your community, you need to treat it like a product. And step one is to track performance and make decisions based on that.
Let's get into it –
You're probably already covering the basics, but I can't talk about what data to track without breaking these down. Start with these three:
Retention: For a monthly membership, aim for around 90% month over month. If you’re at 85% or below, there’s real room to improve. (Annual memberships are more complicated, but over 50% is typically good.)
Monthly active users: Aim for more than 60% of members logging in each month. Expect that number to be higher if your membership is built around daily or weekly habits.
Member growth: Track how many new members join each month or during a launch. It matters, but it tends to follow when you get retention and experience right.
I broke down the revenue impact of just 5 points of retention improvement in one of my most popular podcast episodes: 1.77M in revenue from a 5% retention lift
Now that we've covered the basics, the real insights come from tracking member success.
The question that matters most is whether your members are actually succeeding. This is the data I'm looking at:
The first action: Decide what quick win you want every new member to get, such as booking an intro call, starting a course, or taking a quiz. Then track whether they actually do it. This tells you whether your onboarding is working.
Who’s stalling: Flag the members who don’t take that first action, then have you or your community manager reach out to them personally.
Connection: Look at connections made, DMs sent, and calls attended. Check whether members are going to the events their onboarding recommended.
Progress toward goals: Check in on the goals members set during onboarding. Are they reaching the milestones you’d expect?
This is where highly engaged communities and word-of-mouth growth come from. And you can see how important your onboarding design is when thinking about what metrics matter most. You can't just invite people to a space without guiding them through an experience (at least not if you want them to stick around).
We’re piloting custom member dashboards.
At Affinity, we’re now building custom member dashboards, and we’re piloting the service right now, so this is the most affordable it will ever be. It’s a good fit if you have an established membership with over 100 members and at least 6 months of data.
Book a call with me if you want to be one of our guinea pigs.
Oh, and we'll audit your community as part of this, which means we may very well help redesign your onboarding.
Listen To Build With Becky
In the podcast this week, I go deeper on benchmarks, how AI is changing data analysis, and what to do with all of this once you have it.