Member Review and Refresh

Is your user list in need of a spring cleaning? Are you wondering what to do with  inactive members or email bounce backs? Then you’ve come to the right page.

In this overview, we’ll cover how to decide what to do and what steps you need to take to remove and replace inactive community members.

Member Review

Step 1 – Understand User Engagement

First you want to understand what your community user’s engagement looks like. You can get a quick sense of this from looking at the User tab, exporting some key metrics and calculating counts in excel. Filter in the User tab to exclude admin accounts and any other member (in case you only want to look at a sub-segment) and include the following metrics:

• Joined
• Last Login
• Last survey completed
• Completed Surveys

Step 2 – Criteria

Decide what your criteria is for determining active members. For example:

• Last Login
  • For example: if respondents have not logged on to the community in 3 months, 6 months, or some other time frame, you may want to consider removing them.
• Number of activities invited to vs. completed
  • For example: If respondents signed up during the original recruit (let’s say 1 year ago) and have only participated in 0-5 activities, you may want to consider removing them.

You may decide to use a combination of criteria, e.g., has completed less than 2 activities in the past 6 months and has not logged in in the past 2 months.

Step 3 – Member Reach Out

Now you have a list of members who have not been very engaged. Consider emailing them or sending out a Community Satisfaction Survey. This will allow community members the opportunity to formally opt out of or back in to the community, share their feedback on the community, and help you improve member experience.

If you plan to send out a survey to the community, make sure that it’s a quick 3 to 5 question survey. The survey should cover the following types of questions:

1. Would you like to continue being a member of [INSERT COMMUNITY NAME HERE]?
2. What do you like best/least?
3. What are we doing well?
4. What can be improved?
5. What is missing?

Email Bounce Backs

It is inevitable that as time passes, some community members' email addresses will become stale and you will get email bounce backs. It is recommended to monitor and track these emails. This allows you to archive members who cannot be reached anymore.

Monitor and Track

Each time you send invites to an activity, monitor your mailing in the Mailings tab.  Track email bounce backs you receive when you send out activity invites. Create an excel file that contains the following: community member's email, bounce back reason, and date. 

Archiving

Once a month, you’ll want to refer to the excel file and archive the recent community members on the list. Make sure you note in the file the date they were archived.