The Ultimate Community Audit Guide: Evaluate and Improve Your Community
TL;DR: A community audit evaluates your community’s health, engagement and growth opportunities. It gives you clear insights, identifies strengths and weaknesses, and provides a roadmap for improvement.
Building a vibrant online community is not just about gathering people in one place. Community building is about nurturing interactions, encouraging meaningful discussions and cultivating lasting relationships. Read - Minimum Viable Community.
Conducting a community audit is your secret weapon to ensure your community stays healthy, vibrant, relevant and continuously growing.
Think of a community audit as a health check-up for your online community. It keeps you informed, proactive and responsive. Oh, and it’s surprisingly easy to do it and we’ll show you how.
What is a Community Audit?
Simply put, a community audit is the process of measuring the effectiveness, relevance, engagement and growth of your online community. It focuses on three main areas:
Member Engagement: Are members active, responsive and connected?
Content Quality: Does your community constantly provide valuable, relevant and varied content that users demand?
Growth Metrics: Is your community growing steadily, retaining members and attracting newcomers?
It’s recommended that you should conduct your community audit at least once every quarter.
Why is Community Audit Important?
Regular audits allow you to:
Connect Deeper: Understand your members better - what drives them, what excites them and what frustrates them.
Improve Strategically: Refine your strategies and remove guesswork from community building.
Growing Effectively: Create a clear, achievable roadmap for continued growth and vibrant interactions.
In short, community audit is important because it helps you maintain community health and growth.
Note: Community audits are especially important when your business employs Community-led Growth.
The Essential Community Audit Checklist
We have developed an 8-point audit checklist that can be applied to communities of any type and size.
Define audit objectives
Gather insightful community metrics
Evaluate member engagement patterns
Assess the quality and relevance of content
Evaluate community’s emotional health and sentiment
Benchmark your performance against competition
Summarise findings to highlight key strengths and opportunities
Develop a practical, actionable improvement plan
Let’s dive deeper into each of these steps.
Conduct Community Audit: Step-by-Step
The goal of a community audit is to get a clear picture of your community’s current state using data - and to check if it aligns with your growth objectives.
Step 1: Clarify Goals: Start with “Why”
Before anything else, community managers should clarify the objectives. Start by asking a simple question:
Why does [XYZ] Community Exist?
There could be several answers. For example,
“to keep existing customers engaged”,
“to constantly onboard new members”,
“to build a network of power users”,
“to establish thought leadership in the niche”.
Having a clearly defined goal helps you focus on the important metrics to track. This is our next step.
Step 2: Gather Insightful Community Metrics
Now that the goal is clear, it’s time to measure what matters.
Depending on your platform (Jatra, Discourse, Slack, Circle), collect the following data:
New members per week/month
Daily/weekly active members
Average time spent per visit
Churn or drop-off rate
Look for trends, not just numbers. Are members becoming more active over time? Are they dropping off after joining?
These community metrics help you spot friction points and identify what’s working. Make a note of these.
Step 3: Evaluate Member Engagement Patterns
Data tells one part of the story. Behavior tells the rest.
Break your users into three groups:
Core Members - they are always active, posting, liking, replying
Casual Members - occasionally show up
Silent Members - rarely engage
Now, go deeper into their engagement patterns:
What content do core members interact with the most?
Are casual members converting into core members?
Why are silent members not engaging?
Look into response times, likes per post, member-to-member conversations and recurring discussions. This will help you refine your community engagement strategy.
Step 4: Assess the Quality and Relevance of Your Content
A healthy community runs on high-quality content. But what makes content valuable?
Ask yourself:
Is the content solving problems for your members? (aka painkiller content)
Are members creating content?
Are your key content types (articles, discussions, quizzes) getting responses?
Look at the post formats, engagement metrics (likes/replies) and content freshness.
Also check if the content is easy to find through searches or navigation. Poor discoverability of the content is a silent killer. Make sure all the good content on your community has proper inbound links from within the community.
Step 5: Understand Community Sentiment and Emotional Health
Engagement is good. But how do members feel about the community?
Sentiment shows up in:
Feedback threads
Tone of conversations
Support messages
Exit surveys
The best way to know how community members feel is to directly ask them:
“What’s the one thing you’d improve in this community?”
How does being part of this community make you feel?
Also scan for frustration signals - like unresolved posts, repeat complaints, or members correcting each other rudely.
A positive, respectful and helpful tone is the key to community retention.
Step 6: Benchmark Your Community Against Others
Don’t audit in isolation. We see many community managers completely ignore the competition.
Pick 2-3 communities in a similar niche. Analyse them for:
Content formats they use
Engagement techniques (events, AMAs, newsletter)
SEO and discoverability
Community layout and structure
Be brutally honest about the things they are doing better; and areas where you are ahead of them.
This external scan will help you stay competitive and attract more members to your community in the longer run.
Step 7: Summarise Findings - Tell the Story
Don’t just dump charts and metrics. They carry no meaning. Instead, build a compelling story.
What’s working well?
Where are the leaks or drop-offs?
What are the members asking for that they’re note getting?
What surprised you?
Step 8: Build a Practical Action Plan
The audit means nothing without action. This is the final goal of our community audit. With the available insight into the current state of our community, it’s time to put in action plan.
Convert each insight into a small, actionable and trackable task. Remember, you can improve it ONLY IF you can measure it.
Revise onboarding emails to highlight most active threads
Launch a feedback post every Friday
Create content calendar around 3 most liked topics
Conduct “Member of the Month” interview with most active members
Add gamification badges to encourage replies
It’s essential to assign deadlines or fixed timeframes to each actionable item and measure it. Make it a shared mission and not a solo effort.
Common Community Audit Mistakes To Avoid
Stay ahead by avoiding the common pitfalls of audit like:
Ignoring Qualitative Feedback: Communities are ‘human’. Numbers don’t tell the whole story.
Failing to Implement Action Plan: Audit has no meaning unless it’s followed by action
Doing Audits Infrequently: Perform quarterly audits and keep your improvement plan up to date.
Tool Recommendations
As a community manager or auditor, you will have to make yourself familiar with the following tools (recommended) -
Analytics: Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Posthog, Jatra Analytics
Community Platforms: Jatra, Discourse, Circle, Slack
Social Listening: Mention, Brandwatch
Right tools will save you time and enhance accuracy and provide deeper insights. These tools are easy to setup and operate. Read - Skills for Community Managers.
Let’s Do It Together
Community audit can be overwhelming. If you need help; feel free to get in touch with Jatra officials. If you have any question about the audit, ask below.
