The Business of Belonging: How to Make Community your Competitive Advantage

Middleton breaks down community conflict into five levels:

Asynchronous experiences provide breadth. Synchronous experiences provide depth.

These are actions that will live somewhere on your commitment curve. By tracking the number of members who take that action over time, you can get a good signal of whether community engagement is driving business results.

We can use the SPACES framework in Table 5.1 and see what an ROI action might be that correlates to each part of the model.

I call these ROI actions.

To do this, go back to the commitment curve and find the actions that will drive the business objective you set for your program.

You'll also want to control your data collection process to account for other factors that might influence the outcomes. “You can make sure you're not sending the survey during peak periods or low points of the year (that could skew some people from responding vs. others), making sure you're surveying folks from the same type of area / demographic,

Selection bias just means that the people most receptive to taking the survey are the ones who will likely take it, meaning you won't have the most clear representative sample to apply to your entire population.

You might find that power users are getting a lot of value, but new members are not.