How to Measure Engagement Based on a Range of Behaviors (Video)

Video produced by Steve Nathans-Kelly

At KMWorld 2019, Rachel Happe, co-founder and principal, The Community Roundtable, discussed the findings from her organization's "State of Community Management" research, which shows how engagement empowers individuals, impacts workflows, and generates strategic impact and ROI; frameworks and methodologies to more concretely define and measure a range of engagement behaviors; leadership practices that leverage engagement strategies to transform organizational culture; and best practices to scale your efforts once you crack your own engagement code.

Hoppe spoke during a session, titled "Crafting Culture With Communities & Engagement."

"I work with a lot of community managers around a huge range—non-profit, big Fortune 500, small commercial and startup companies—and we're starting to figure out how to break down engagement, and from that work, we created what I call the community engagement framework, and basically, it's looking at behaviors and saying there are four general categories of behaviors."

There are hundreds of behaviors in general, but there are four general categories of behaviors if you organize them by value," Happe said. "We tend to measure just the first one which is validating behaviors. I view that content, I like that content, I share that content with somebody else or I respond to that content. That's the least valuable behavior, but it's the one that most systems can measure, so that's what we look at.

The next set of behaviors is sharing, she noted. I shared something of my own with you as a gift or a act of generosity. An email that comes off really, really poorly meaning if I finish a project and send it out to 200 of my closest friends in the organization and say 'Hey look, I finished this project, take a look.' Nobody does that. It's antisocial, but in communities, you can share it if anybody wants to see it. It's an act of generosity rather than an act of bravado I guess, for lack of a better word."

Sharing can be a lot of things, said Happe. "It can be images, it can be documents, it can be ideas, many things. Once I share something and I get validation for that sharing, that is like the gateway drug for engagement, because now I feel connected and I feel like I matter, and so I'm going to share again because I shared something that somebody found useful, and from there, I may dip my toe into ask-and-answering, and if I get positive responses, I'm going to start develop trust with that network of people that I'm sharing it with, and from there, I move up into, once I feel really comfortable, I'm okay asking open-ended questions, doing that innovation and collaboration that all of our executives are after, but you can't really do that in a space of people that don't trust each other, and the way I measure this is the breadth and the depth of that behavior, not how much content was shared, not how many views content is getting."

Videos of KMWorld 2019 awards presentations, keynotes, and many sessions can be found here.

Many speakers at KMWorld 2019 have also made their presentations available at www.kmworld.com/Conference/2019/Presentations.aspx.

KMWorld 2020 is Going Virtual: NOVEMBER 16-20, 2020!