How has the Insight Community and the projects run through it helped stakeholders? Have its insights been valuable? Has it provided strong findings for negotiations with buyers or suppliers? Has it made senior people’s job easier? Have processes changed because of it? This might be a bit tricky to measure but by looking through the different projects you’ve used your community for, you’ll soon have a good idea on the impact it might have had.
Creating value. Saving money. Preventing losses. These are the three broad ways in which insight can help you to support profitability and growth. Value creation is the most eye-catching of these. Has the Insight Community led to decisions which have created new value for the business – for instance product launches, changes in policy, or other customer closeness initiatives?
"The impact a community may have may not be seen until months later, so make sure to record all the different projects your community influences." Kelsey Catchpole, Junior Project Manager
Has an Insight Community identified efficiencies and saved the business money? In many cases an Insight Community will itself be a long-term cost efficiency compared to the cost of the discrete research pieces it replaces. The feedback from the community can also be vital for identifying areas of low priority for customers where money can be saved.
Prevent your brand from making mistakes and bad investments. Whilst Insight Communities can help with this, it’s the hardest to prove the value of, since it’s tricky to measure predicted losses. In some cases, though, the advice of an Insight Community will have been critical preventing such errors.
All of the above are quantifiable and are important areas to look for proof of community ROI. But they become doubly powerful when allied to a ‘hero story’. It’s a way of framing the work of the community so it becomes a strong narrative in its own right, one that can be retold (internally and externally) in ways that put the business and its management in a better light.
These are some of the measures you can monitor as a way of demonstrating ROI. But in themselves they don’t prove that the Insight Community has been a business success. This is where you need to connect your measures to business issues and provide evidence that the community has had a beneficial impact.
