Scale vs Growth.

What does good growth look like?

Whilst Slack doesn’t give you hugely indepth insights about your community usage, it does provide you with a very useful distinction between three levels of engagement in the community:

1. Total Members — this is anyone who has access to the community, the total population size if you like.
2. Weekly Active Members — this is anyone who has been active (which i think is defined as visited a channel within a 30 days?) recently.
3. Members who Posted — this is anyone who wrote a message, and i’m assuming, left a reaction emoji, DM’d, etc. Interacted in some form.

For my purposes, I’m only really interested in the weekly active members (let’s call them active) and members who posted (let’s call them engaged), and the differences we see there. Currently there are near to 1000 total members, and the active members are roughly 15–20% of the total audience size. This stacks up against Pareto’s Principle, but I’d love to know how it stacks up against a) other slacks, and b) online communities at large.

We’ve seen some significant growth of the total audience in the past six months, although frustratingly, Slack doesn’t show that on our graph, so I’ve estimated it (it seems to be accelerating recently, roughly exponentially, more on that in a bit), and…