Practical tips and example to conduct a self-audit on your community that will yield actionable strategic insights
In the professional community building space, there’s a lot of discussion of community audits. They’re a common step in building strategy, and a common service that community consultants, including me, offer. (In Circle’s Solution Partner Directory, for example, about half of the featured consultants offer audit services).
But, what does it actually mean to ‘audit’ a community? ‘Audit’ is a pretty broad term—I know I personally associate it most strongly with tax season (sorry to bring it up). But, for our purposes, we should think of a community audit as basically taking a look through all existing community components and evaluating them to try to make improvements.
In an ideal scenario, your community would be audited by an independent expert who isn’t connected to your community, and therefore can approach your community with fresh eyes to help you understand how to apply best practices and make improvements.
But, the reality is that many projects don’t have the resources to hire experts for projects like this. And, sometimes there can be a benefit to conducting an audit yourself, as it allows you to take all the context and expertise you have of your project into consideration as you evaluate. So, in many cases, self-audits are appropriate or even necessary—I’ve personally done them many times.
But, the definition I shared above of an audit is still pretty broad—what, exactly, does it mean in practice to “look through” and “evaluate” a community? I put together this how-to guide to answer that question and make it easier for community builders to structure and conduct audits of their communities themselves.
Every community is different, and so every audit is different, and many consultants and pros structure their audit processes differently—and you will, too. But, my hope is that this guide can give you enough information to understand how to structure an audit project that will serve your community’s growth.
Plus, I did a pro-bono community audit that’s featured as a case study in this article so that you can see some of the ideas I talk about in practice, and developed a free template you can use to get a head start on your auditing.
In this guide, I’ll share:
What a community audit can actually look like, and what formats it can take
When to do a community audit, and what community components to look at
A general structure for the kinds of questions you should aim to answer in your audit, plus a free template to give you a head start
A real case study of a pro-bono audit I did with Private Label People, a community for e-commerce pros that they’ve generously let me feature here
More resources to support you if you need more help, or an external expert eye, on your audit
Without further ado, let’s dive into the guide.
What is an online community audit, really?
Before we get too deep into this guide, I want to make sure that you have a clear picture of what an audit really looks like in practice for most community builders. Like I discussed in the introduction, it can be a little hard to hammer this down—because communities vary so widely, so do the formats and outputs of the audits done of those communities.
But, in general, audits are going to be a summary of learnings from the community builder or consultant’s investigation of the current community, and are going to take one of the following forms:
A simple summary document: Often, the output of an audit will be a simple document that draws together all of the most important outcomes of the research the community builder or consultant does. It’s common for these to be organized into:
A brief overview section that addresses why the audit is being done and what materials are being evaluated
An observations & learnings section that explores the insights that came out of the audit
A recommendations section that introduces potential future action items to address the learnings and audit goals.
This is the format the audits I do for my clients generally takes, and the format I’ll be providing in more detail in the free template that comes with this blog post.
A learnings deck: Similar to the above, but it’s common if an audit is being done by a full-time community manager who will deliver the work to an executive or internal team for the output to take this format. In this case the only difference might be that the community manager presents the key data and action items first, and saves the observations and learnings for as-needed support for their recommendations only as requested from the exec.
A spreadsheet or data dashboard: In some cases, especially where there is an existing community with lots of analyzable data points, part of the output of an audit might be an in-depth numeric analysis of the existing community that is presented as a spreadsheet or data dashboard. For example, when I worked at Teachable, part of an audit I conducted once included logging and analyzing three months of community activity for topic, sentiment, engagement, and other attributes. This numeric audit helped provide a stronger background for the learnings of my audit overall. Numeric audits are extremely tough to provide a framework or template for because they vary so drastically depending on the data available, so I will mostly not focus on this here. But, it bears mentioning that if you have these resources available to you, you should use them.
Later in this guide, I’ll share a template to help you put together your own audit, plus a real case study example of an audit I did for another community so that you can see these formats in action.
When should you conduct an audit for your online community?
Because audits can either be very in-depth (see: the spreadsheet example I shared in the last section) or very lightweight (i.e., just spending a few hours analyzing your community across a few key areas), an audit might be a good strategic tool to utilize at many different phases of your community building journey.
For example, you might conduct a light-weight self-audit, or invest in hiring a consultant to do a mini-audit, just to get you through a moment where you’re trying to answer some big strategic questions about your community (i.e., during annual planning, at a moment where things don’t feel like they’re working well, or to get you unstuck from a strategic crossroads). In some ways, audits are a great one-size-fits-all strategic approach to getting high-level insight when facing nebulous challenges.
Audits are a great one-size-fits-all strategic approach to getting high-level insights when facing nebulous challenges.
But, there are also a few specific moments in community building when audits should almost definitely be done to ensure a complete strategic approach:
A community migration: Community migrations are probably the quintessential moment when community builders do audit projects. That’s because they usually have a ton of clear source material to turn to (i.e., the previous community), and a clear strategic challenge that’s driving them to make the migration in the first place (i.e., need to increase engagement or need stronger access to data). Audits are important to conduct during a migration because they can help ensure you don’t reproduce the same errors from one platform to the next.
A personnel change: Another common, and beneficial, time to conduct an audit is if you are starting a new job where you are inheriting a community. While this may not exactly be a strategic change for the community itself, it’s a comprehensive way for the new community builder to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the community and identify areas that need attention. This can often be a good starting place for forming a 30-60-90 day plan when entering a new community-building role.
A major program launch or strategic shift: Audits may also support a big strategic shift or major new program launch in a community—say, a community that’s previously been entirely forum-based and is shifting to events, or a community that was previously free and is now moving to a paid model. Like the above two examples, audits can be essential for taking stock of what’s already working and not working and making sure these insights are taken into account during the re-strategizing process.
A new community launch: This one may be counter-intuitive—if you’re launching a brand new community, how can you do an audit? An audit of what, exactly? But, I often advise my clients who are launching new communities to include an audit in their research and validation phase as they go through the complete strategic process. That’s because oftentimes we do have historical data we can analyze that is relevant to a community launch, even if we don’t yet have a community, exactly. What I often encourage my clients to look at are any areas of their business where their customers, or perspective customers, are already participating in some kind of peer-to-peer interaction (or depth interaction with your team) that could inform community strategy decisions. A couple of things to consider if you fall into this category:
Are your members already engaging in any peer-to-peer spaces? I.e., active social media comments areas, in-person or virtual events, or conversations on message boards that aren’t run by your brand?
Are your members already engaging in any depth-engagement with members of your team? I.e., providing product feedback via product boards or user research, participating in advocacy or case-study programs, participating in affiliate marketing or brand partnerships, participating in speaker or content co-production programs?
What can you learn from your existing peer-to-peer or depth engagements that might impact community strategy?
Now that you have a sense of whether working through an audit might be right for you, let’s break down the actual components of a community audit—spoiler alert, in the next section, I’ll share a free template you can download to support your self-audit.
What should your online community audit address?
Now, let’s take a look at what your community audit should address. I’ll break this down here in this blog post, but I’ve also put together a more plug-n-play template version of this section so that if you are conducting a self-audit, you have a good place to start. You can grab that template for free here:
But, even if you’re not using my template, generally this is what any community audit should address:
Audit Section 1: Audit Overview
This section goes up top and explains a few things:
First, what are you trying to accomplish with this audit? Is there a particular strategic problem you’re trying to solve, or a particular moment your community is in (i.e., launch, migration, annual planning) that you believe this audit will help you navigate? Even if you’re in the latter category, it’s helpful to try to bullet out a few specific questions you’re hoping the audit will help you address, or at least specify a few areas of the community you’ll be focussing on (i.e., architecture or engagement)
Second, what sources will you review as a part of this audit, and what will be your method for reviewing them? This part is twofold, because you need to outline both which community ‘components you will consider,’ such as:
Community forum
Community events
Social media comments
Data source, AND
You also need to outline how you will approach reviewing these materials, such as:
Spending x amount of time reviewing y timeframe in the community forum
Logging interactions in the community forum for x period of time based on specific attributes
Talking to members or other internal stakeholders about their experience with specific programs (this one veers into user research territory, which is a whole ‘nother blog post, but I’m including it here since it could absolutely be part of adding color to a lightweight audit).
Audit Section 2: Observations and Learnings
Your observations and learnings section is the real meat & potatoes of your audit—it goes over the quantitative and qualitative data that come out of the audit activity. Observations and learnings can be quite open-ended, and it’s likely you’ll see things pop up there that you didn't necessarily anticipate or specifically identify as questions in your overview section. But, if you’ve never done an audit before and don’t know what to look out for, I’d generally recommend focussing your observations and learnings around the following categories:
Engagement
In general, would you currently characterize both the quantity and the quality of engagement happening within the community? How is this serving or detracting from business goals?
What trends and patterns do you notice about engagement within the space? I.e., are there certain engagement formats and/or topics that seem more or less popular? Similarly, are there trends around when members seem most likely to engage?
Which admin-generated engagements are currently effective, and which ones are not? For example, do certain content pillars regularly receive higher engagement than others?
Architecture
Which sections of the community are used most regularly? Do you have a hypothesis as to why?
Is there anything about the current community architecture you suspect might be confusing to members, or that you’ve received feedback (or click-map data) about?
What do you notice about how the current architecture or navigation of the community serves or detracts from business goals?
Programs
Outside of the community forum itself, what community programs are currently active? Which ones seem most and least effective?
What feedback have you received about desired community programming that might be missing? Is there anything in your audit in other categories that might point to programming opportunities?
Community strengths & weaknesses
In general, open-ended discussion of strengths and weaknesses, whether or not they fit into the above three categories, are generally warranted in an audit.
I provide even more structure and examples of specific things to look out for in your audit within the free template included with this blog post, that you can download here:
Audit Section 3: Recommendations & Action Items
While the recommendations or action items section is often the most important section to receive from a community pro or consultant, it is generally going to be the hardest to complete in a self-audit, especially if you’re in charge of a community but aren’t yourself a community specialist. It’s generally going to feel much more intuitive for someone who isn’t a community pro to identify problems in a community than to propose solutions.
But, if you’re not working with a consultant who may have years of experience to base their recommendations on, that doesn’t necessarily mean you need to get stuck here. Identifying the challenge areas and the specific problems you’re trying to solve has already gotten you a long way because it means that you now have specific areas of community best-practices you need to learn about, and can be more targeted in your self learnings as you try to find the right solutions.
The other big piece of advice I would give for someone doing a self audit working through this section is to adopt a testing mindset. You don’t have to identify the be-all-end-all solution, you just have to find the right next step, figure out a way to test it quickly, and then move on to the next thing if it doesn’t work.
Plus, in the next section here, I’ll share an example of a complete pro-bono community audit I did with a client, including a recommendations section, so you can see an example of how a community consultant might bridge the gap between learnings and observations and recommended solutions.
Community Audit Case Study: Private Label People
Now, let’s take a look at a sample audit case study I did pro-bono for Private Label People, who generously agreed to have their audit featured in this blog post. I’m a big believer that examples help information come to life—huge thanks to this team for enabling that!
For your context as you read: Private Label People (PLP) is an e-commerce partner that works with e-commerce businesses on everything from strategy, item procurement and production, to fulfillment. To help you get your arms around what they do quickly, I’ll give an example:
Let’s say you have a small business selling customized bachelorette party gift bags. Right now, you’re creating the bags at home, labeling and shipping them to customers by hand, and doing all the advertising for your business. You’ve amassed a small following, but as your business grows, it’s getting overwhelming to do all of this yourself. You want to expand, but you just don’t have the capacity. This is where PLP comes in. They help you:
Produce your product design scalably instead of making every individual item in your home, or select products relevant to your niche from a portfolio of researched products that are ready to launch on the market
Manage logistics so that your product can be marketed, warehoused, and shipped without manual work
Strategize to expand your business by identifying areas in the market where there’s an opportunity to expand your merchandising that fits your niche (for the purpose of our example, imagine add-on makeup and skincare items, bachelorette-party-specific props and decor, etc)
Help you actually acquire additional merchandise and add it to your business
Got the basic idea? Now, here’s where their community comes in:
PLP hosts a community of about 60 sellers similar to the one I described above on Circle. Those sellers participate in this community of practice so that they can continue to scale and grow their businesses with the support of PLP’s team and other similar business owners. While this is a paid community, there are otherwise no pre-requisites or screening to participate. Outside of direct monetization, for PLP, their hope is that the community can help their members reach greater levels of success with their business, which in turn feeds back into PLP’s business because it means members are more likely to expand their businesses using PLP’s support.
Now that you have an overview, let’s dive into the audit itself:
Audit Overview
This is a lightweight community audit happening around PLP’s one year anniversary of their community. It is intended to provide strategic guidance to PLP as they move out of the inception phase of their community and begin to scale. This audit included:
An initial discussion between Noele & PLP founders Emily and Stephen to uncover context, questions, and objectives
About 2-3 hours of asynchronous review, primarily of PLP’s community instance on Circle, and document prep by Noele, then sent to Emily & Stephen for review and questions
A final call to discuss questions and recommendations
The strategic questions we were hoping to address during this audit were:
What opportunities are there for PLP to use the community to grow membership from 60 to 150 over the course of the next year?
How can PLP successfully transition this community to an invite-only space where every participant is well-qualified, and has a higher likelihood of being engaged?
What best practices can PLP apply to improve the onboarding experience for new members?
How can PLP make this owned, private community feel worth visiting, in comparison to a more easy-access platform like Circle?
How can PLP make this community feel valuable to both active and passive members alike?
Learnings & Observations
Current engagement data breakdown: PLP founder Emily provided the following engagement breakdowns for the current community, which give us a sense of how this community currently performs on engagement:
Out of 61 subscribing members:
20 members are classified “green” — i.e., scoring between 7-10 in Circle’s engagement ranking
20 members are classified “yellow”—i.e., scoring between 4-6.99 in Circle’s engagement ranking
21 members are classified “red”—i.e., scoring between 0-3.99 in Circle’s engagement ranking
Community is heavy on learning resources: This community offers a ton of learning resources—from formal courses, to “Research Springboards,” reference guides, events, video libraries, and more. In many ways, learning materials outweigh peer-to-peer interactions within this community space. The existence of these learning materials, while there are some organizational challenges, contribute to your goal of making this space distinctly valuable in comparison to a Facebook community or similar, and contribute to your goal of making this community valuable for both “active” and “passive” participants.
Community is relatively active, with slight admin dominance: Reviewing the aggregated “feed” area of the community, which pulls together posts from all different parts of the community, I can see that there is a decent split between posts generated by administrators and posts generated by members, maybe with a slight bend toward admin dominance. This is especially true when taking into account admin members who are not the founders but seem to be designated super-users who have been delegated to initiate engagement within the community.
Admin posts differ from user generated posts; tactical vs. thought leadership: The character of the posts generated by admin vs members seem to vary pretty significantly: members tend to focus on tactical, practical matters (i.e., questions, discussions of practice, sharing stories surrounding their businesses). Example member topics:
“GPSR and selling in the EU” — member wants to examples of other members dealing with EU compliance
“Brand Registry page 2” — member is looking for an example of a brand registry agreement
“My first MX Sale!” — member is celebrating making a sale
On the other hand, admin posts tend to read like blog posts, include stock images, and
tend to focus around more “soft” topics. Examples:
“The power of 100” — admin is exploring a general principle of practicing and mastering a skill
“Do you ever find yourself in random online groups and wonder why you’re there?” — admin/moderator is exploring an attitude that defines success
“Scaling to new heights: why the climb defines your success” — admin/moderator is exploring the value of process over result
Occasionally, admin will post more tactically, for example:
“New ASIN search bar in business reports” — admin explains new helpful feature in a relevant tool
In general, it seems that the tactically-driven posts, whether they’re made by admin or members, are garnering more engagement than the more general, ideas-driven blog posts that admin are sharing, particularly in the “ALL Insights” space.
Recommendations & action items
Simplify navigation: There are currently 27 options on the left-hand sidebar of the Circle space (necessitating a good amount of scrolling to see all options), and four options on the horizontal navigation. Since one of your goals is to simplify onboarding and make this community easier to acclimate to, I would recommend minimizing the navigation options significantly. A best practice is to limit a community home screen to no more than 10 navigation options. A few opportunities that jump out at me to simplify this are:
Duplicative navigation: There’s some duplication between COURSES, which is shown as a compressed navigation option at the top, and the ALL Courses space group in the sidebar which lists those same courses a second time and adds four additional options to the sidebar. I would recommend removing this from the sidebar and keeping it on the top-level nav.
Compress disparate spaces to encourage engagement: Given the relatively small volume of people in this group now (60) and the desired volume within one year (150), I see no reason to break down the conversation quite this much. Specifically, under ALL Help, which seems to be the main discussion area of the community, I would recommend compressing Ask The Group, Share Wins & Gratitude, and What I Learned. These are all relatively low volume spaces and breaking down conversation in this way often has the unintended consequences of: 1. Adding unnecessary decisions to community interactions (i.e., “where do I post this?”) 2. Edging out authentic & organic discussion (i.e., causing members to think that only posts that fit neatly into a topic category are welcome) and 3. Causing your discussion to seem less active than it is. In general, we don’t need (or want!) to break down conversations by topic unless the volume is overwhelmingly high or the topics themselves necessitate a specific format. More depth on this best practice here.
"Demote" top level nav to resource library: There are some places where I could see removing things from the top-level navigation and instead having them all live together in a resource library. For example, some of the CTAs to “refer a new partner” and “book a call” feel like they don’t belong as prominently as they currently are and could be compressed into some of your service areas.
Simplify nomenclature: There’s a good amount of “in group” nomenclature present within the navigation (i.e., OSCAR, what is “ALL” and why is it so frequently capitalized? Is it an acronym, and if so, for what?). While this can feel compelling for branding reasons, you generally want to limit "insider" language as much as possible in navigation and instead opt for simple, obvious nomenclature that members can understand quickly without further explanation. Like the above recommendation, this will contribute to your objective of simplifying onboarding and making it simpler for members to acclimate quickly. One place I can see making this change is swapping ALL Help for something simple and direct, like “Discussion.” The objective is that you want members to be able to scan the sidebar and as quickly as possible understand where they can go to interact.
Some clarity needed around learning materials: At times, the organization of these various learning materials, or which materials should be accessed for which purposes, feels nebulous. It would be interesting for the PLP team to dig into click-map or other available data (I would recommend user research as well) to understand which types of learning materials are most valued, when, and why. This will help prioritize and organize how learning materials are displayed and recommended. It may also be ok if the community is focussed more around learning materials than around connection, as long as this is adequately communicated in marketing collateral around the community membership; however, this focus may limit your ability to make the community centered around qualified membership as is one of your goals.
Administrators should model ideal member interactions: In general, administrators in this community are doing a great job of participating actively. However, their participations will be more impactful if they focus on modeling ideal member interactions (i.e., post practical, tactical, and relevant subject-matter discussions that invite other members into the discussion with a call-to-action question) rather than interacting in a way that feels distinctly separate from how a member should interact (i.e., posting what feels like a “blog post” within the feed.) I would recommend the team go through a content calendaring exercise following this framework, essentially identifying first engagement goals, then identifying engagement pillars they want to see members posting about that administrators can model. In this way, admin are not simply posting to create noise, but to try to “teach” members how to interact in a way that serves business goals. Given some of the audit and business objectives outlined above, this could look like:
Admin may want to see members posting about their successes and practices with their businesses, so that they can begin to understand and generate potential marketing collateral to bring in new members. To this end, admin start conversations specifically asking for success stories or celebrating specific members. Examples:
“[person] just made their first sale. Do you remember your first sale? If you had to guess, what was the one thing you did that you think led to making that first sale, and how have you scaled it?”
“I just noticed [x new feature] in [x tool]. What features do you use most regularly and find helpful within this interface?”
“What’s something you were struggling with in your business last month, that this month you’re not? How did you fix it?”
Admin may want to increase the depth of engagements that members are having so that discussions feel more high-level and further qualify membership. To this end, they may try to raise the quality of conversations by ensuring that members are focussed more on sharing specific best practices rather than simply asking break-fix questions. Examples:
“Many of our sellers are trying to reduce their critical inventory. Is this a goal of yours, or something you’ve already achieved? If it’s a goal, what support do you need to make it happen? If you’ve achieved it, how did you do it?”
“What compliance issues have you faced with your business? What learning resources helped you get on top of them?”
Conduct user research to better understand member objectives: As I noted in the learnings section and discussed in my recommendation above, there seems to be a disconnect between the types of conversations admin are currently starting, and the types of conversations members want to participate in. I would strongly recommend conducting a round of user interviews to get closer to understanding what, exactly, members are hoping to gain specifically from their interactions within this community. This can help you model interactions that serve those goals. This user research can also help you understand some of my comments above about learning materials. As I noted in the learnings and observations section, a wealth of learning materials can contribute to your goal of making your community feel valuable and worthwhile in comparison to a Facebook community, but this is only true if you can validate that the learning materials provided are in fact the ones that your members or desired members value highly. User research could be a strong step to validating this.
Onboarding: Currently, PLP has a “Start Here” area that contains a brief “how to get started” section as well as the code of conduct. Generally, I would recommend three things—
Break out the ‘Code of Conduct’ into its own section so that it’s not buried here and can be easily referenced and linked to at all times,
Focus on making the ‘getting started’ checklist more centered around ‘activation milestones’ than just generally pointing out things about the community. Think: what are five or six actions that I want my members to take as they go on a journey from ‘inactive’ to 'active'? I think introducing themselves may be one, and attending a live event may be another, but you may also want to get them involved in commenting and posting within the community, or other peer-to-peer activities.
Expect to layer in-platform onboarding (this checklist) with out-of-platform onboarding (most likely, an email sequence that aims to take them through these activation milestones. More on effective community onboarding sequences here.
More resources to support your auditing efforts
Thank you so much for taking the time to read this post! While it’s my hope that this blog post has equipped you well to add community self-audits to your strategic tool kit, I want to take a moment to share a few additional resources to support your efforts.
Further reading:
Max Pete, a community builder at Square who I greatly respect and collaborate with frequently, put together this excellent community audit template you can swipe from Notion. I’m a big fan of taking inspiration from multiple experts to find something that works best for you, so even if you downloaded my template, grab Max’s too and take the things that work best for you to create your own special sauce. They’re both free. Psst—I also highly recommend Max’s newsletter, which is one of the few Substacks I actually regularly open.
Tiffany Oda, another community legend who is currently lending her talents to the Asana team, also wrote an excellent article on Medium recently about community audits—she specifically focuses on using audits as a tool when you’re entering a new role, so if you’re in that position yourself, you might find this article helpful. She even put together a deck template you can swipe which is an incredible starting point if you’re conducting an audit for an internal presentation. Thank you Tiffany!
Getting help from an expert
Like I mentioned in this article, while self-audits can be incredible and relevant, there are some scenarios where you may want to bring in an external expert to evaluate your community with fresh eyes and suggest action items based on their experience and best-practices.
If that’s the case, I’d love to hear from you about working on an audit of your community. This is a super common lightweight first project for me to work on with for a client, because it’s usually about a 4-6 engagement that can still yield pretty deep and wide results. When I work with a client on an audit, it usually looks like this:
We have an introductory call for me to get to know your community project, business goals, and what you’re looking to learn from the project
You give me access to your community and I do 2-3 hours of asynchronous work to explore and prepare my learnings and recommendations
We have a final call for me to hand off your audit document and for you to ask any questions or request any final notes
You take the recommendations and action items forward from there to make improvements on your community and meet your goals!
If this sounds like it’d be a fit for you, fill out this form and tell me you want to work on an audit to get started.
Thanks for reading—go forth and audit!
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