Written by: Marcia DaCosta and Evan Goodfellow
Panel Health. Sure, it sounds important, but how do you define it? How do you measure it? How do you achieve it?
To have an online community that yields accurate and representative data, users need ensure there are appropriate numbers of active members within each group of desired demographic distributions. Therefore, panel health for an Online Community is mainly a measure of one thing: activity levels. Activity levels categorize members of an Online Community by their most recent activity in the Community. Our software has the capability to set the parameters of activity levels a user would like to measure, allowing users to perform certain actions for the various activity levels they have created.
For example, a user might choose to distinguish between three activity levels: 1) those who have participated in a survey or discussion at least once in the last 90 days 2) those whose most recent activity was 90-120 days ago 3) those who have had no activity in the last 120 days.
From there, users can look at the numbers of people in each of these activity levels. Activity level one would be regarded as “active” users, and would require no action. Activity level two contains people who need to be re-engaged. A special promotion could then be run to target those people. For instance, a promotion to award entries to a draw for an all expenses paid weekend giveaway if a participant completes a survey and invites one friend to the panel. This would effectively raise the membership numbers, and re-engage members who have not participated for a while. The survey could then be created and only sent to those who are in activity level two.
The people in activity level three would be regarded as non-active users and might be removed from the community, or not counted in the “active users” total for the community. This would yield a participant count that is truer than the count of registered users alone.
Activity levels are important information to monitor and are effective when trying to maintain and grow membership numbers for an Online Community.
If you would like to learn more about our Online Community software, contact us.