I recently had a briefing with the folks at Lithium, an enterprise social software platform provider that specializes in customer communities.  During the conversation, they introduced me to a very intriguing way of capturing the health of a corporate community.

Lithium has recently turned their experience and expertise with online communities into a publically available tool for measuring the health of online communities: the Community Health Index.  They compare this index to well known measures like the FICO score and Body Mass Index (BMI).  Their hope is that the Community Health Index will become an industry standard way of measuring and predicting vibrant communities.  Companies can use the index and it’s metrics to diagnose where the community needs the most help and then measure efforts over time.  Since its release last year, they have already seen references to the tool showing up in public discussions, in prospect RFPs, and even with a few competitors. 

You can take a look at their whitepaper here.

Lithium used aggregate data from a decade’s worth of community activity (15 billion actions and 6 million users) to identify key measures of a community’s health:

• - Growth = Members (registrations)
• - Useful  = Content (post and page views)
• - Popular = Traffic (visits)
• - Responsivess (speed of responsive of community members to each other)
• - Interactivity = Topic Interaction (depth of discussion threads taking into account number of contributors)
• - Liveliness (tracking a critical threshold of posting activity in any given area)

The data behind these metrics has been validated and normalized for customer communities, but I think these most of these same metrics are transferable to internal enterprise communities as well with a few exceptions.  If nothing else, I think corporate community managers such as those responsible for social learning environments like those at SUN and British Telecom would likely agree that capturing similar data for their internal communities would be a valuable way of measuring their overall health.

Growth as measured my new registrations may not be applicable, however system usage as a percentage of total employees (depth of adoption by the employee base) would be a useful stand-in.  Stickiness, or the degree to which employees come back regularly might also be a helpful equivalent.
Useful content is just as important for internal communities. 

In internal communities, Useful could be measured by page views, as Lithium does, or by ratings, or by Kirkpatrick-type level 1 surveys: which content is useful to you in your job?

Measuring the Popularity of the community would in itself be similar to a Kirkpatrick level 1 evaluation: people will go where they find value.

Responsiveness is highly important within internal communities.  It speaks both to how helpful the site will be to employees and to how engaged they are with the community overall.

Interactivity can be directly transferred, and would be a useful way for internal community managers to gauge what an employee community’s social learning needs are.  Of course, where community elements are built around pushed formal learning, peaks and valleys in Interactivity may be more related to timing of corporate initiatives and less to community health.  The key would be to look for sustained interactivity outside of periods of prescribed activity.

Like Interactivity, Liveliness is directly transferable, but also subject to affect by corporate directives.

Lithium has used their data to create a visual map of what different types of health customer communities look like.  Internal communities could use the same metrics, however what healthy means and looks like will likely be very different.   Only further time and data will tell…

What are your thoughts?  To all you corporate community managers out there, are you attempting to measure your communities using the CHI?  If yes, we want to hear about it.  Comments please.

-David