RedesignMe.com has been running for over 2 years and hosts a select group of designers, marketeers and consumers. From day 1 we have been closely watching our member’s online behaviour inside of our community. This lead us to some interesting observations.

User categories
Some members send in a lot of designs and concepts, others just love to rate ideas and write comments while another group only seems to browse the site now and then without posting anything. These conclusions came from interviews we had with our members (more about this is in one of our next blogposts) and from looking at individual profiles one by one. Of course, as our community grew bigger and bigger, this called for automation.

Custom User Metrics
Unfortunalely standard tools like Statcounter or Google Analytics only track overal traffic and can’t really measure individual behaviour. That’s why we decided to built a custom “Community Metrics Dashboard” that automatically groups people into a certain behavioural category and tracks shifts in behaviour over time. This way we can measure how and when our targetted online campaigns and newsletters have the desired effect. It also helps us determine which Challenges and questions are too dificult and what can be changed about that. While the tool is still very simple it is already very powerful.

Universal
The Dashboard can’t only be used on the RedesignMe community of about 4300 members but also on our client’s communities like the one of Albert Heijn and the Dutch Ministery of agriculture. These groups are  smaller and this make community management even more important because smaller groups are harder to mobilize and get a grip on.

Conclusion is that user metrics in co-creation communities are very powerful and important. Without them, you don’t really know what’s going and you may feel like a blind person visiting the fair. Without thorough user metrics it can be difficult to leverage the full potential of your community.