We unintentionally do use SPACES I guess! Specifically for our community, we’re measuring:

S: Potential case deflection volume = Unique Visitors * Deflection Multiplier (I’m using 15% for ours since it seems to correlate with historical data; have used as low as 5% for some communities and as high as 20% for others)

P: # of Feedback Topics; We also generate analytics on specific topics that are of interest to our product team such as views, # of posts, etc.

A: Unique visitors is the primary metric; we do track membership and engagement rate as well, but those are more “for us” metrics than leadership

C: % of user generated content (UGC) = # of posts not by employees / # of posts total; our goal here is to always be above 50% with a goal of eventually getting to 80% - currently at ~60%

E: # of posts and # of members (measured month/month growth, year/year growth)

S: I’d say these are our OKRs which are: self-serve ratio = # of unique visitors to community / # of unique ticket submitters; and audience growth y/y with a goal of at least +10%

Hope that helps!

Very cool ​@jillian.bejtlich 
Thanks a lot for sharing! It helps me a lot 

In your case, has this been enough to present the value of the community within the business?

Happy to help ​@L.L!

To answer your question… sort of. Metrics alone don’t tell the whole story to the intended audience (leadership). The value of our community has been presented more through a narrative of both quantitative and qualitative impact that provides evidence of business impact. For example, our community has taken on a lot of solution engineering and we’ve got amazing evidence and stories from that. We have significantly impacted SEO - again backed up with evidence and stories.

I find that when we show leaders #’s like the SPACES model, they want to know how to grow the wrong things or have expectations that don’t align/aren’t reasonable. For example, our community is predominantly support and solution engineering. Membership is not something we need to grow, yet it’s always one that leaders kind of hyper-fixate on. Instead we try and redirect them to audience growth (unique visitors) and consumption (page views) and how that’s impacting the self-serve ratio; along with strategies and business metrics to try and impact.

That's what it's all about. One last question ​@jillian.bejtlich : Do you use other tools to monitor these metrics or can you get them from the platform? ​

​@L.L - We are able to get most of our metrics (SPACES and otherwise) off the platform. The exception is grabbing ticket data from our ticketing system (currently Zendesk) and also grabbing some search insights off Google Search Console.