Lee Romero

Community of Practice Metrics and Membership, Part 3

I previously shared our general strategy with regard to answering the question about who is a member of a community of practice and, given our answer, how we actually implemented a solution to support our understanding of community membership. In this post, I’ll be providing some more insights and ideas around how we’ve been able to use this data and how it has helped shape our community strategies. Hopefully at least the latter might be of use to you.

Demographics – By Organization and Geography

By defining community members as we have and, further, by taking care to connect those members to their larger identity in our corporate directory, one of the areas we found we could delve more deeply into was the demographics of community members: what organizations made up various communities and what geographies were represented.

By marrying membership to the corporate directory identities, we could link to cost centers of the members and, through those, to the larger organizational units and geographies containing the community members. The following shows a sample of the type of data we could review (I’ve generalized the labels to obscure some of the details here – I’m simply trying to illustrate the ideas here):

CoP Demographics by Geography

This first chart shows the progression through quarters of the percentage of the overall community population from each of the major geographies in which we operate. Similar to the ability to view the percentage of the company overall that was a member of a community, this analysis leads us to being able to understand who makes up the communities and, more specifically, allows us to target certain geographies if they are believed to be under-represented.

A few additional drill-ins we could support with this view was the ability to see this same demographic data for each individual CoP – so specific communities could find where they might need to target some education about the communities.

Because we could get total counts for geography headcount, we could normalize this data – so we could compute the percentage of each geography within the overall community population or within each individual community. This allows better comparison across geographies, not just across time within one geography and helps to focus even more on geographies that might need some attention.

The following shows a table with data showing a breakdown by functions over time. In this case, I’ve kept it tabular to show that this provides a multi-level breakdown, though, again, I have generalized labels.

CoP Demographics by Function

This data does not support anything distinctly different in terms of actions that the demographics by geography does – it’s simply another way to slice the data to understand community members, both overall and by community.

Demographics by Community

Another approach we could use with this data was to ask the question – “How alike are the communities?” In other words, what is the demographic slicing of community when the slice is by community? This analysis starts to get into the “academic” mode as I was not sure at the time (and still am not) if there is anything actionable that can be done with this insight, but it is interesting to understand the overlap between communities. The following is a table that shows the slicing of 11 communities along the dimension of each of those communities.

CoP Demographics by Community

Reading across a row of the table, the value shown is the percent of the community in that row that overlaps with the community in that column. The diagonal going from upper-left to lower-right is obviously 100% as each community exactly overlaps itself. The report also color-codes the table so that particularly high or low values show a bit more obviously.

In hindsight, I realized that this is really doing something like a network diagram of the community program, where the nodes are the communities and the weight of the links are the percent overlap.  I have not used that visualization with this data but it’d be an interesting way to understand your community program.

Spread Across Communities

A last example of a use for this data was effectively an inverse of the demographics by community – trying to understand how widely spread out the community members were themselves. In other words – how many people are members of exactly one community, how many are members of exactly 2 communities, etc. As with the demographics by community, I do not believe we ever found anything actionable from this insight, but it proved an interesting way to understand how widely people’s interests ranged across communities. The following table shows the data across two quarters for this view of community members. For each value along the X axis, it shows the # of people who were a member of exactly that many communities in each of the two quarters.

Given the relatively large jump between quarters of members who were a member of exactly one community, my guess (without diving into the details) would be that this likely represents a targeted campaign in a new community to gather members among a group who previously had not been involved in a community. While we never performed it, it would be interesting to correlate how / if people would tend to “spread out” among communities over time – perhaps joining one and, finding value in their participation, they join additional ones (in other words, people may migrate a bit to the right in this diagram over time).

Spread of Members Across Communities