If your organization licenses Group Manager, you can set up a Community Dashboard for each of your communities.

Community Dashboards are customizable reports that track several metrics that are important to online communities, including:

• activity over time,
• discussion performance, and
• charts on user types.

These dashboards can help your organization measure the success of each of its communities over time.

Dashboard overview

Customizing your Community Dashboard requires some effort. Often, these dashboards are set up by Higher Logic during implementation or when the Group Manager module is licensed.

NOTE: If you need help at any point during this process, create a case and we'll be happy to assist you.

Available widgets

You can customize a Dashboard with the following widgets. Refer to the image below to see an example of each.

Pie graph

• Shows percentages of the users in your community in reference to your data sources
• Examples of data to display in this graph:
  • # of members/non members,
  • # of subscribed/not subscribed,
  • # of accepted/not accepted to terms & conditions

Line graph

• Graph to show change over time
• Examples of data to display in this graph:
  • any data with “in the past x days”

Rank graph

• Shows how well your community is doing on a particular data source compared to other communities. Click it to display a leadership board with more details.
• Examples of data to display in this graph:
  • # of users who posted in discussion or started thread,
  • # of email subscribers

Gauge graph

• Shows how well you are doing based on a standard you set.
• Red indicates poor performance, yellow is average, and green is good. You set the ranges for each level.
• Examples of data to display in this graph:
  • # of logged in the past x days,
  • # of users who posted in discussion or started thread

Bar graph

• Standard graph that displays multiple data sources in one place
• Examples of data to display in this graph:
  • # of users who posted a discussion,
  • # of users who logged in the past x days

You can customize the data each of these widgets displays, with some widgets being better suited to display certain types of data than others. It's often a good practice to test a data source in a few widgets to see which works best for your needs.

How to customize a community Dashboard

This process comprises two steps. Let's walk through each one now.

NOTE: If you need help at any point, create a case and we'll be happy to assist you.

Step 1 - Create data sources

The first thing you need to do is create what are called data sources: Simply put, these are the specific metrics you want to measure and display in one or more of the Dashboard widgets. If you're familiar with Automation Rules, the creation process and available metrics are quite similar.

Once created, these data sources can then "plugged into" one or more of your graph widgets to display the data. This process is outlined in Step 2. 

Create a data source

To manage your data source:

1. In the Admin Toolbar, click Admin.

2. Navigate to Users > List Builder.
3. From the first dropdown, select Community Dashboard List.
4. Click Create.

5. On the next page:

1. Select a Community Type from the first dropdown at the top. When configuring a data source (step c below), you'll be able to choose from communities belonging to this Community Type.
2. Click this dropdown to select a metric to measure. After selecting one, click Add. The added metric is displayed in the area below (area c). You can repeat this step to add additional metrics, if needed.
3. Any added metrics are displayed in this area. Each can be further configured via their associated menus (e.g., selecting a specific community (belonging to the Community Type you selected previously) or entering the number of days back to retrieve data). Note that if you have more than one metric, you can choose whether they act as "and" or "or" statements by clicking the associated button at the bottom.
4. In the List Name field, give your data source an appropriate name.
5. From the dropdown to the right of the Save button, select Save and run now.

Step 2 - Add data source to a graph widget 

Now that you've created one or more data sources, let's learn how to associate them to a graph widget. 

1. Navigate to a community's Home page.
2. Click Settings > Dashboard. You are now viewing this community's Dashboard.

3. In the Admin Toolbar, click (or right click for a new tab) Edit Page.

You're now editing the page in Page Designer. By default, each of the five Dashboard widgets is added to the page.

IMPORTANT: The Pie Graph widget is the only one Super Admins can add; the other four widgets can only be added by Higher Logic. Because of this, do NOT delete these widgets. If you don't need a particular widget, simply hide it. You can find the Pie Graph widget is in the Community category.

4. At this point, you need to obtain the key for each data source you want to track in a graph. For this step:

1. Open a new browser tab.
2. In the Admin Toolbar, click Admin.
3. Navigate to Users > List Builder.
4. From the first dropdown, select Community Dashboard List.
5. Edit a data source.

6. Copy the data source key from the URL, as shown below.

5. Back in your other browser tab, where you're editing your community Dashboard, edit the graph with which you want to display the data source. To do this, click to select a graph, and then click its Edit icon.
6. Paste the data source key you copied a moment ago in the Data Source field.

7. The remaining configuration parameters differ depending on the graph type; complete these parameters as desired.
8. Click Save.
9. Repeat steps 4–9 for any additional data sources you want to track.
10. Lastly, back in your other browser tab, edit each data source you used and make sure you select the Save and Run Now option. This will prompt the system to gather the data and populate your graph(s) with it immediately. Otherwise, they will populate when the "rule runs," similar to the automation rule schedule.

NOTE: After selecting this option, you may see a pop-up confirming that the data source you have set up will display as the current configuration and overwrite any previous configurations.

Tips

• If one data source has a very high number that make other data sources too small, put that data source in its own graph.

  • Example: If logged in, library downloads, and posted in discussion users are all around 50-100, but # of email subscribers are around 50,000, put the latter in its own graph.

• For pie graphs: You only need to put in one data source/list and the system will automatically fill in the rest of it for you (e.g., If you put in a data source that pulls for all those who “are members,” the system will fill in the rest of the data and label it “not members”).

• To customize dashboards by Community Type, you will need to create a custom landing page for the Community Types. In the Community Type settings, there is a place for “dashboard page codes” where you can enter that in.

Community leaderboards

This feature is an extension of the Rank graph widget, which shows a community's rank compared to similar communities. In the image below, for example, the Rank graph shows that the Florida Chapter is ranked 11 out of the 11 Chapter communities for the number of community members who have a profile picture:

You can click the Rank graph to view the Community Leaderboard, which will help you understand why a community received their rank compared to their peers. In this example, the Florida Chapter has the lowest percent of community members with a profile picture:

Community representatives

On the Community Leaderboard page, you'll notice that each community has a "representative" that helps put a "face to a community" – in hopes of sparking a sense of friendly competition among communities.

Super Admins can decide which Community Role should be considered the representative for each Community Type.

EXAMPLE: For Chapter communities, the Regional Director may be the community representative, whereas Committees may want their Chair to be the representative.

How do I select the Community Role for a Community Type?

1. In the Admin Toolbar, click Admin.

2. Navigate to Community > Communities > Types.

3. Select a Community Type and click Edit.

4. Scroll down to the Emails section and select the role from the Community Representative Role menu.

5. Click Save at the bottom of the dialog.

Community Performance email

This feature gives Super Admins an additional way to notify Community Admins about their community through automated emails. This is accomplished by configuring the Send Community Performance Email to automation rule. See Create & Manage Automation Rules to learn how to access and create automation rules.

Because the Community Dashboard is located on your Thrive Community, it requires Community Admins to log in to the Thrive Community site and navigate to it to view the statistics. If desired, Super Admins can set up an automated email daily, weekly, monthly or annually with a community's important key performance indicators (KPI) compared to the last time the admin received the email.

EXAMPLE: You could configure a weekly Community Performance email to all Chapter Community Admins that shows an increase/decrease in how many community members have a profile, opted into the Volunteer pool, and registered for the Annual Conference compared to a week ago:



On a weekly basis, an email will be sent to the Community Admins providing a snap-shot of how their community is performing according to the criteria set forth in the automation rule: