How the numbers are made
Community activity, a written claim about why it matters, then a business result. Nothing skips the middle step.
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Community signal
What happened
Posts, answers, attendance, commits. Counted, deduplicated, traceable back to the source.
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Bridge metric
Why you think it matters
Your claim, written down and printed on the screen, where anyone in the room can disagree with it.
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Business result
What the business already tracks
Customer retention, referrals, support deflection. Priced with your numbers and owned by a named team.
A worked example, with illustrative figures
Community signal
1,180 questions answered by members
Bridge metric
Members resolve 34% of questions, up from 29%
The claim: a question answered in the forum is a ticket that never opens.
Business result
Support deflection worth $47K
Priced at your $40 per question answered. It counts at the low end once the bridge is corroborated.
Why we don't compare members to everyone else
The people who join a community were already your most engaged customers. Comparing them to everyone else credits the community with something it did not cause. So each bridge is judged by timing instead: does a member's business result follow their own community activity, within 90 days, more often than chance would put it there?
A simulation we ran where we knew the real answer was +15%
TribeROI never prices a bridge on that comparison.
What a bridge can come back as
- Hypothesised
- Authored, and waiting on enough data to test.
- Instrumented
- The data is there. Not yet judged.
- Corroborated
- The evidence backs the claim.
- Refuted
- Tested, and the evidence does not back it.
- Not enough evidence
- Too early to call it either way.
Three rules
- Community activity never connects straight to a business result. A written claim always sits in between.
- Every dollar figure comes from a number you gave us.
- You get a range whenever the method leaves room for one. The low end counts only claims the evidence backs; that is the figure for finance.