Forum Milestones

[Shawn Gossman]

I consult with bloggers.

One of a blogger's biggest failures is setting a goal that is unrealistic and too large to complete in a short amount of time.

My main recommendation is to set milestone goals.

This can easily apply to forums, too!

What are milestone goals?

For a forum, it would things like:

• Getting your first member
• Getting 100 posts
• Getting 100 topics
• Adding your first moderator
• Etc.

So, as you can see, these goals are realistic and easy to achieve.

See, with goals, we need to be able to complete them sooner rather than later; otherwise, we will instinctively feel like we are failing. We're human, after all.

So, set milestone goals. Set them smaller at first and increase as you grow.

 

[Cpvr]

VPL recently reached 10,000 posts and 540 members, and my next goal is 20,000 posts and 1,000 members.


These are the two milestones I’m striving to achieve next.

 

[JoelR]

I'm going to tweak these milestone goals (which, as a concept, I fully support. You can't run a marathon without being able to first run a mile, then two miles, then 5 miles, etc. first).

You need to tweak your goals to those that you can control. One of the biggest, most consistent failures that I see by legacy forum admins is that they focus on engagement goals. Engagement is a consequence of objectives and tactics that you implement. Instead of "500 posts" which is entirely dependent upon other people, focus instead on "host a contest and promote it at least 3 times." Then you experiment, adapt and modify.

 

[Shawn Gossman]

I also think it's importance to have goals that actually give you something in return.

Getting 500 posts is nice but what does it do for you or the forum, aside from changing the metric.