User intelligence

It’s very easy to focus all your energy measuring things other people want to know, but measuring the right things can be a vital tool to help you improve and market your offering and serve your community better. Make sure you’re also collecting data to help you make decisions about what you should do next.

Finding out what your users are actually doing on your platform is critical to deciding what’s working and what needs improving. Prioritise the functions you want your users to use in your tools, such as signing a petition or subscribing to updates, and watch how many of your users can do it successfully. As you make changes to key functionality, watch how these figures change. If possible, get metrics for how well key pages perform at their principle purposes: how many people drop out of your signup form? How many people who view a video leave a comment? How many people who sign your petition also forward it to a friend? Getting into the detail of how your product works, and doesn’t, can give you incredibly useful data about how to improve it, and what to keep the same.

Marketing information is usually harder to gather, particularly demographics, but with a tool like Google Analytics you can usually see where your visitors are coming from – both geographically and where they came from online – and how these different visitors behave once they reach you. You can also run surveys to find out more about your users, and ask them for feedback via your platform on who they are and how they feel about the technology you’ve offered.

The more users you have, the more information you get to help you improve what you’re doing. But don’t be afraid to go and talk to people, e-mail trusted users and involve the community in your thinking. Sometimes the stats can lead you in one direction, but make sure that if you do something your community doesn’t like, they can tell you quickly.