Community Membership Reporting

[Toby]

Good day all,
When I look at the Membership number on my home screen, does this number include all community members who have been onboarded and even members who may be former employees or clients? 
Does this number continue growing each year of a community's existence?

Thank you,
Toby

[A11ey]

@Toby Yes, the OOTB component that is typically on the homepage lists all members, so anyone who has completed the login process. ("completion of the registration/onboarding process can differ across Communities based on their login requirements).   

For an active community this number should grow YOY.  

Hope that helps!

[Toby]

Thank you so much @A11ey !
Would it be possible that the OOTB component that is typically on the homepage listing all members could include former employees or customers who are no longer active?
I do see the number growing YOY, but wonder if I should be looking at another number to see how many accounts are still active rather than the rolling total of people who have completed the login process.
Cheers!

Toby

[A11ey]

@Toby the OOTB component, by default includes all members, it would require customization to report Active members.

Reporting on "Active" members starts with defining what active means for your Community, active in the last 30, 60, 365 days? Are active members as defined, only those who login, those who post? How often do they need to post, to be considered active, once, once a month (Causal user vs Superuser)? Also consider users who do not post, if your community is public facing, then anyone who visits your community (observers) and finds information could be considered an "active user", private communities require login

Once you define that, there are several ways to slice n dice the metrics, check this post for details Community Analytics & Metrics Definitions  about the different ways to report on Members.  For example, Registered Members shows a breakdown of active community members over the last 60 days, Observers, Casual Members, Superusers.  

When I was at Sprint I also used Signin & Registration metrics (can be found in Admin Metrics) to track activity for Members (logged in). We typically looked at "Active" within a month time frame, then averages it out over a year.

I know that is a long answer, but "Active" can mean different things for different Communities 😉