Define success. Is that definition tied to the mission of the forum?

By what criteria do you measure the 'success' of your forum

[Webwork]

Just a wide open question.

Give some examples, if you care, of the 'successes" of your forum.

For example: Through the action of the members of forum X the lives of 100 widgets were saved in Elbonia when we collected and shipped 100 tons of food.

My gut suggests that many forums 'measure their success' merely by the number of posts or members.

Is that all there is?

[chadmg]

Well, for my forum, I feel I have three markers for success. Since I am in the early stages, I would say it is successful when I have enough posters that the site is self sufficient. New members are coming in, and old members or sticking around. In the future, I'd measure success by making enough in advertising to pay for the site, which is currently just my hobby. After I reached that goal, I'd probably raise my marker for success to making enough to live off of.

A forum on a corporate site would probably measure success if the forum provided enough answers about their company/products that they either increase purchases and/or they spend less on customer service.

[Webwork]

This realm - of 'success' or 'mission' or 'purpose' - is an interesting realm for a discussion of applied metrics or measuring.

If your mission is education how to you guage your success?

If your mission is information?

If your mission is 'make money' that's not too hard to guage, though I suspect many people haven't really weighed all the costs: For example, opportunity cost of devoting time to forum versus devoting time to, say, law practice ;-)

If your mission is to 'promote xyz' how do you measure your achievement?

[rogerd]

"How does one define success?"

Books have been written about this, and I doubt if we could get a concensus here. I think you are correct in stating that success is tied to the mission of the forum (assuming that the founder has defined the mission well).

The mission really goes to the motivation of the founder(s). Some forums are private and have no aspirations to high traffic. Some forums may be profit-motivated and measure success in terms of net revenue. Tech support and customer service forums may measure success not in terms of traffic, but in how quickly each customer issue is resolved by an appropriate reply. An e-commerce company might look for increased traffic not only on forum pages but on product pages.

Factors external to the forum may serve as measures of success. For instance, a reduction in product returns or an increase in customer satisfaction might result from a support forum effectively handling customer issues.

Traffic and posts ARE certainly measures of success - lots of repeat visits and tons of new posts mean that many people are deriving some value from the forum. It's entirely possible that a busy forum isn't achieving its mission, of course. A profit-oriented forum may find the activity is increasing bandwidth, hardware, and moderation costs while not generating much revenue; a forum intended to foster high level philosophical discussion, for example, might find that much of the activity is off-topic chit chat.

[faltered]

Like chadmg, my forum is extremely new (just a few weeks old, she's a baby!).

The mission or goal of my forum is to be able to support my site by answering any questions people have on my services. Also, it's for small business owners to help out other fellow small business owners by offering them tips, advice, etc. Kind of like small business networking.

I hope that in turn, I'll be able to snag a few clients this way, but I'm not counting on it. I still plan on going through with my other marketing plans. This was just another aspect to my site which I thought worked in many ways.

BTW- this section on forums is great for someone like me. I enjoy reading all these threads. Thanks!