What I've learned from studying 800+ communities

Meet Sharath, the Head of Community at Threado, a community engagement and automation platform:

In the process of building Threado, we have deeply studied hundreds of communities of various sizes and across different industries. The analysis broke down community sizes into 5 ranges: 0–500, 500–1,000, 1,000–5,000, 5,000–10,000, and 10,000+. The industries taken into the study were DevRel, SaaS, Edtech, Professional Communities, D2C, and Web3.

Many of these communities we’ve been a part of and have closely seen how they function. Communities are closed spaces, so they have little room for transparency.

What happens is you, as a community builder, don’t have a lot of understanding of how other communities are doing.

Unless you become a part of that community and experience it for yourself, which can be quite challenging and time-consuming given the work you already have on your plate.

But understanding how other communities are performing can be important to compare and see how your community is doing. So, we decided to work on a benchmark report on how these 800+ communities are performing so the managers could have something to compare their community metrics to.

For instance:

If you’re a 10,000+ member strong SaaS community and you have an activation rate of 20%, is that good enough or not? The benchmark report not only answers all these questions but also accompanies these observations and insights with suggestions to improve.

This benchmark report explores the communities that we studied into 3 very critical sections:

1. community experiences,
2. community engagement, and
3. community support.

Let’s explore what we found.

The first impression: Community experiences

Build your top of the funnel

Community experience can be thought of as a funnel. The first touchpoint begins when a member joins the community and how beautifully you personalize this experience is what separates dormant members from the active ones. Starting then, throughout the funnel, you can gradually nurture members towards conversion, regardless of the eventual business objective. New members comprise a significant part of the community and your growth strategy should involve how you communicate with them.

What did we observe?

• 👥 Communities across industries have seen 41% growth in new members every month.

• 🏗️ In fact, even larger communities have seen more than 30% growth in new members each month.

An insight for you:

• 📈 D2C communities have seen the highest growth in new members every month but when it comes to the highest new member growth, one SaaS community took the cake at 190% MoM growth.

Some professional tips:

Some of the best approaches to scaling communities are through:

• Referral programs that members can share in their internal networks.
• Activating more community advocates or champions who can drive word-of-mouth flywheels.

There’s nothing like great onboarding

Once you have a significant increase in new members every month, it’s also parallel important to focus on onboarding. Onboarding is a critical part of community building. This is the perfect time to bridge curiosity and action.

When a member joins the community, they have no or very little idea of what to expect. How you gradually acquaint them with the community is perhaps the most important factor in activating them early on and improving the chances of higher long-term engagement.

What did we observe?

• 🛫 Great onboarding can lead to 85% better activation rates.

• ✅ Communities have activated 30% of new members each month.

Some professional tips:

A great way to handle onboarding is to follow a fragmented approach such as to not overwhelm new users but also give them all the critical pieces of information that can encourage them to participate in the community.

We’ve seen that a 30-day onboarding is ideal because the longer you keep new members engaged, the better the chances of them getting activated.

Retention is a bi-product of activation

If you’ve activated more members early on through great onboarding, retention is almost certain provided the value you offered remains consistent.

What did we observe?

• 🫂 About 10% of members are retained after 6 months.

• 🚀 Only about 9% of members are retained by the 6th week.

Some professional tips:

From the data, we can see that members recognize the value within the first month of being a part of the community. Leverage this time to have frequent check-ins with them and gather important feedback to avoid dormancy.

If you have a smaller community, consider having 1-on-1s to add a sense of personal connection which can go a long way

Fun Fact

It takes a village: Community engagement

Only a handful of members carry community engagement

It’s no secret that most of your community is and will remain lurkers, but how much of it exactly do you have to work on or worry about?

What did we observe?

• 🏃 About 5% of members in the community are active every week and about 9% of members are active every month.

• 🥇 The top 2% of your community can be responsible for up to 92% of the engagement and about 8% of your community is moderately active.

Some professional tips:

• Figure out your most active contributors and gradually nurture them to become your champions and advocates.
• The top 2% of your community are already your champions. Create community programs like super users or advocacy programs that will add structure to word-of-mouth growth.
• Maintain weekly and monthly active users through weekly updates, recaps, guest events, AMAs, mentorship programs, and more.

We found that late afternoons (around 3 PM - 4 PM) and mid-weeks (Wednesdays and Thursdays) are when most of the communities are active.

Quick Tip: It’s important to figure out when your community is most active and schedule all of our content around that time to drive maximum engagement.

Community support will never be the same

Community support needs an upgrade

It’s hard staying on top of everything in your community, especially when it comes to answering questions and providing support. Even if you are constantly active, it’s not always possible to respond quickly.

What did we observe?

• ⏳ The fastest average response time across all communities is close to 10 mins.

• 😕 What’s even more concerning is that only about 45% of the questions asked in communities are answered. That’s less than half responses to all possible support opportunities. These opportunities could’ve resulted in conversions but the lack of proper tools have forced it otherwise.

Some professional tips:

To be honest, it’s very difficult to stay on top of everything in your community and even more so, answer every question without any delay. But it shouldn’t be that way.

In the age of AI, why should support go overlooked?

ChatGPT has led the advent of AI and since then, thousands of tools have emerged that leverage AI to solve clerical problems. Gen AI is a revolutionary new change in the business world; a technology that’s only limited by data, almost as smart as us (if not more). But intelligence isn’t the highlight, it’s the speed. Thousands of hours of manual work, done in seconds - that’s a powerful technology to have at your disposal.

If we could harness that and create a tool that offers support without needing any manual intervention, then support can be redefined completely. No more waiting around for solution experts to “get back to you” or searching through a sea of help articles trying to understand what goes where or what happens how.

This is why we built Threado AI - a support bot for your community that can learn anything you want it to learn. And the best part? you can install the bot in your Slack or Discord community where it can respond to questions automatically within seconds. This way, no question goes unanswered and the response time is next to negligible.

How does the bot work?

For the bot to be able to offer support, it needs to be trained on how the product works and what needs to be done. Train the bot on everything from community conversations to links, help guides, online documentation, or PDFs.

How will this bot revolutionalize support for you?

• Scale instant support anywhere - embed it on your webpage, add a widget in your product, and have it answer all queries on Slack or Discord.
• Custom train in on your knowledge base - support URLs, PDFs, and even Slack and Discord conversations.
• Get a deep understanding of the type of queries and improve the AI experience

This is more than just a report

The benchmark report is an attempt to help community managers re-center their community compass and focus on the things that need attention. By understanding which metrics they’re lagging behind on and by comparing it with other communities in the space, they can essentially realign priorities and strategies for ways to improve on it. Of course, communities are about so much more than just metrics and data, but when it comes to being on the same page as business goals, there are certain ends that community managers need to communicate with the decision-makers. Figuring out what’s missing is a great place to start.