Community KPI-dashboard : a virtual community evaluation methodology

Abstract

This thesis addresses the problem of identifying and measuring success factors of virtual communities. This task is highly relevant since virtual communities are part of today's society and have many different possible applications for enterprises such as involving the customers into the process of developing new products or for marketing to build brand loyalty. But to establish a virtual community can be hard and success is not guaranteed. To increase the success of virtual communities, general success factors as well as keyperformance-indicators shall be identified and different designing methods will be described. This thesis analyzes the success factors of famous virtual communities like Stack Overflow or Wikipedia and previous scientific work dealing with this topic. Based on the literature review and a case study about an online community for exchange students at the technical university of Vienna requirements for the 'Community KPI-Dashboard' were derived. The -Community KPI-Dashboard- is a Drupal module to measure and visualize the identified key-performance-indicators for virtual communities based on Drupal. To achieve this, the reports of the 'Community KPI-Dashboard' were designed and implemented as far as possible on Drupal core and additional functionality was added using other popular Drupal modules for online communities. The reports generated by the -Community KPI-Dashboard- include measures about activity, audience, content, purposes, roles, quality and views in the community as well as a small social network analysis. In the end ideas and approaches for further enhancements and development of the 'Community KPI-Dashboard' are discussed.