How to Benchmark Your Online Community—Against Itself

It’s natural to want to compare your community’s performance to others in the industry. Many organizations wonder, “How does our community stack up against others?” It seems like a simple business question: we run a community, they run a community—are we doing as well as they are? What should our numbers look like?

However, there’s a major issue with this approach: no two communities are exactly alike. Your benchmark should be your baseline. Measuring improvements relative to your starting point, rather than focusing on others, is what really matters. Comparing community success against arbitrary numbers can be misleading, as every community’s journey is unique.

Instead of relying on external numbers, the key is measuring your progress over time. The goal should always be continuous improvement. But how do you know if you’re on track? While benchmarks are useful to see how you’ve evolved, anchoring yourself to strict, comparative figures can be counterproductive. In fact, it’s a fool’s errand to tie your success to someone else’s community.

Understanding Community Lifecycle Phases

One of the best ways to assess your community’s progress is to understand where it sits within the community lifecycle. To do this, you should evaluate your community across several key areas:

• Phase: What stage of the lifecycle is your community in?
• Key tasks: What should you focus on at this phase?
• Graduating tasks: What will indicate readiness for the next stage?
• Team composition: Who makes up your community team?
• Executive involvement: Is leadership engaged in the community?
• Key leading indicators: What metrics can you track in real-time?
• Key lagging indicators: What metrics show results after the fact?

By understanding these areas, you can map your community’s progress across five distinct phases: Development, Introduction, Growth, Maturity, and Decline. Let’s take a closer look at each.

1. Development Phase

In the Development phase, your community concept is still forming. You’re in the ideation stage, trying to solve a business problem through community but haven’t yet defined the audience or solidified the concept.

Questions to ask:

• Do you have a clear business problem your community will solve?
• Have you tested your community idea with potential members?
• Is there a set soft-launch date?

Graduating task: Create a community plan that includes acquisition, retention strategies, and success metrics. This plan will serve as the foundation for moving to the next stage.

2. Introduction Phase

In this phase, your community has launched to a core group of early adopters—whether customers, fans, or influencers.

Questions to ask:

• Is most of the content in the community seeded by your team?
• Are categories flexible enough for change based on user needs?
• Are your goals and KPIs defined and being tracked?

Graduating task: You’ve successfully launched, tweaked the initial setup (categories, gamification), and your community is now open to the public, consistently hitting baseline goals.

3. Growth Phase

Your community is running and growing organically. At this point, member-driven content is becoming more common, and you are beginning to identify potential moderators and brand ambassadors.

Questions to ask:

• Is your community continuing to grow in line with your KPIs?
• Are you adding headcount or resources to support the community?
• Are you developing paths for members to become moderators or ambassadors?

Graduating task: You have trusted moderators and identified brand ambassadors. Community members are enforcing norms with little need for intervention. You’re consistently achieving community goals.

4. Maturity Phase

In the Maturity phase, your community runs itself with minimal day-to-day involvement from you. Your focus has shifted to managing policies and overseeing the moderation team.

Questions to ask:

• Is the community self-sustaining, requiring less hands-on management?
• Do you have a strong core of moderators and brand ambassadors?
• Is the community seen as a critical channel by your company?

Graduating task: Ensure the community remains engaging by innovating and responding to members’ needs. Watch for signs of declining interest, both from your members and internally from the organization.

5. Decline Phase

When a community enters the Decline phase, traffic drops, unanswered discussions pile up, and engagement wanes.

Questions to ask:

• Is your community losing traction within your organization?
• Are key metrics like pageviews and engagement significantly down?
• Are you struggling to secure internal support to revitalize the community?

Graduating task: Reconnect with your community and address the decline by re-engaging members and seeing signs of renewed participation.

The True Benchmark: Measure Against Yourself

At the end of the day, the most useful benchmark is your own improvement over time. External comparisons might provide a reference point, but each community is different, and what works for one might not work for another.

Instead, focus on the graduating tasks for each phase of your community’s lifecycle, and measure success by your ability to meet these milestones. Continuous progress should be your guiding principle. Stop fixating on industry-wide numbers and start measuring your own journey. It’s the fairest and most effective way to achieve success in your community.