Community Management made Easy with Salesforce Communities Dashboards 2.0

Salesforce Community Management got easier with the new Salesforce Communities Dashboard 2.0 that was rolled out as part of the Summer’14 release (we think, Santa came early this year). An upgrade on the Salesforce Communities Analytics 1.0 Package, the package provides easy-to-access and easy-to-understand dashboards that come in two versions: for Communities with Chatter and for Communities without Chatter.

The dashboards are mapped to community pages and can be accessed from the Community Management section. Dashboards solve many problems in a single step. With dashboards, you have:

• Ready reports for effective community management
• Pre-defined labels on your reports
• How to consider historical data (upto 90 days)
• Easy spotting of the trends

Take a look at how the package has changed the flow of creating reports:

Our Salesforce Community Specialists worked around with the package and installed it for our in-house community (with Chatter). Here’s our take on Dashboards 2.0

After setting up the package, under settings, you can choose the dashboard for eight labels – Overview, Activity, Groups, Members, User Licenses, Self Service, Moderation, Topics, and others.

As Vishal Sharma, our Salesforce Community Expert puts it, “If an organization has a Salesforce Community & Chatter, Communities Dashboard needs to be installed. It saves a lot of time for the Community Manager that he used to spend creating manual reports. The package makes a community manager’s job easier and raises his productivity.”

This sentiment is echoed by other users as well. Phil Weinmeister, a user on Appexchange posted this review

True enough. If we take a look at the Overview Dashboard, we can see that it covers multiple categories of metrics like Adoption, Engagement and Trends; all on one screen. With one click and on one screen, it is possible for the community manager to quickly look at the community’s health.

If the community manager wants a deeper look into how his community is doing, all he has to do is access the other dashboards.

The Activity Dashboard lets the community manager garner in a glance – how many posts were there in the last 30 days, how many comments came, member metrics related to contribution and the level of activity and the groups that are most active. It even covers the number of unique daily contributors that can help a community manager see the “real” activity.

Group Dashboard gives details about the most popular posts in the group, the most active members in the groups, top commenters in the group and more. On one screen, the community manager can know how all the groups are performing.

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With the Self-Service Dashboard, the community manager can gauge the effectiveness of his community’s knowledge base. He can look at the type and number of questions posted on the community and how many answers a questions gets, who are the top respondents, which are the best answers, who asked the best questions and more. This tracks the metrics for the user profiles. For the same metrics for groups, another label can be accessed – the Q&A Dashboard.

Moderation Dashboard lets the manager look into the flagged items, members and metrics.

Topics Dashboard helps you gauge the most talked about topics in your community and lets you plan your community content strategy, and more.

Content Dashboard lets the community manager take a look at the content activity and creators.

One Minor Gripe

For Communities with Chatter, the dashboards are critical for faster decisions. However, we have one minor gripe with these dashboards. It is not possible to create new labels inside the package. You can create custom reports and other categories, but they will not be treated as an intrinsic part of the package. If Salesforce allows the creation of new labels inside the package, that would be awesome!

Winding Up

It is safe to say that 2015 will be an exciting year for Salesforce Communities. With the Community Cloud announcement in DF’14, new dashboards’ package and future Chatter upgrades; everyone has something to look forward to.

How has your experience been with the analytics dashboards? Let us know in the comments below.

Have a great Christmas and a great year ahead!

About Grazitti Salesforce Community Services