#ClubChat: What metrics do you focus on for your Slack community?

#clubchat #discuss

Alex Angel Feb 2 ・1 min read

This week's question:

If your community has a presence on Slack, what sort of metrics do you focus on to determine health and impact the community has on your organization?

Discussion (10)

Michael Hall • Feb 2

I focus on connections between members (who's talking to who, who's talking to the most people, etc)

I also track who is helping others, in which channels, and on what topics.

Lastly, I track welcoming messages (Hi, Hello, Welcome, etc) and thankful messages (Thanks, Thank you, thx, etc) to see the overall mood of the community.

Alex Angel • Feb 2

Love that you track thanks for sentiment! Are there other key phrases you like to track for negative sentiment and, if so, how do you balance that with the positive (if you can't speak to this I totally understand)?

Michael Hall • Feb 2

In my experience it's too hard to try and gauge positive/negative sentiment in comments. Even the best AI I've see struggles with being accurate enough to be useful. So I track these two specific kinds of messages, which reliably have some specific keywords in them.

But I do use keywords to tag conversations by topic, like a specific piece of software or initiative I'm running. Here's just some of what I have right now:

Michael Hall • Feb 4

FWIW, I created a Tag to try and track negative sentiment using keywords "sucks, horrible, terrible, awful, very bad, regret".

Overall, it didn't match many comments. Some were false-positives (somebody calling their own example "terrible", for instance), but it did identify a few legitimately negative comments.