Pave Your Way Through Slack Community Numbers
Are you a Slack-based community creature that is into data? Then this one is for you!
Context
If you’ve ever tried to make sense of what’s happening inside your Slack community, you’ve probably realized one thing fast: Slack wasn’t built with community analytics in mind. It’s great for conversations, sure. It’s where devs hang out, swap ideas, and occasionally (okay, often) drop the perfect meme. But when you need to actually quantify all that buzz, good luck.
Unlike Discourse, where metrics are baked right in, or Discord, which we’re gonna cover next week, Slack makes you dig.
So why do so many developer communities still choose Slack? Because it nails what devs care about most, which is simplicity, flexibility, and integrations. It’s where people already are during their workday. The challenge isn’t getting them to talk. It’s understanding what all that talking means.
In this one, we’ll break down what’s actually measurable in Slack, what should be measured, and how to bridge that gap. Whether you’re running a 100-member workspace or a 10,000-member one, we’ll help you find signal in the chatter (and maybe even justify keeping that pricey Slack plan to your boss).
Prerequisites
I don’t like using too many words to convey crucial concepts. If you’re running a Slack-based community and want to get a real sense of where it stands, there are three main things you should know:
… depending how deep you wanna dig.
Quick ops note: what you actually get access to depends on your pricing tier. As of now, here’s how it breaks down:
Pro tier: gives you access to the Admin Analytics Dashboard, which is solid if you just want quick visibility. But if you’re looking to automate things or pull metrics into another reporting tool, this isn’t the one as you’ll need to manually visit the dashboard every time or download a .CSV file. Which brings me to the next tier.
Business+ tier: his is where you unlock all the goodies. You get everything from the Pro plan, plus Message Activity Analytics and the Admin Analytics API, which lets you automate monthly reports (more on that below).
Analytics Landscape
No matter which platform’s analytics we’re talking about, they all come with a long list of metrics to track. The real trick, though, is figuring out which ones actually matter to you and deciding which are worth keeping an eye on.
Slack is no exception. You can find the full list of available metrics (there are 81 of them!) along with explanations of what each one means here. But let’s zoom in on what’s truly worth your attention.
At the end of the day, here you’ll probably care most about two big categories: brand awareness and activation. And here’s what Slack has to offer (already pre-cherry-picked):
Brand Awareness Metrics
Membership
Total members
Activation Metrics
Membership
Monthly active members
Public & Private
Where people are reading
Where messages are sent
Messages and Files
Messages sent
Channels
Members who posted
Messages posted by members
Of course, you’ll always need to course-correct based on your specific goals, but the set above should cover most of what you need.
How to go about the tech around it
It all depends on what you already have in place, but generally, there are three main approaches. The intention is the same across all of them:
Understand what’s going on with their community and based on that build value for their members and their company
The three approaches are:
The New Guy: you’re fairly new to the game and just want to get a handle on what’s going on, without diving too deep into the tech side. In that case, you’ll be fine with occasional visits to the Slack Admin Analytics Dashboard, downloading the data as a .CSV, and manually importing it into a BI tool of your choice when you need to analyze some data snapshots
The Mature Community Techie: you’ve been around long enough to know what matters. You can code, and you already have a reporting stack you want Slack to feed into. For you, it’s all about the API as you want to automate data pulls and pipe them into whatever tools you’re using (Airtable, Notion, or your own data warehouse setup maybe).
The Curious Community Builder: you’re not deep into code (yet), but you’ve got that experimental streak and know your way around AI tools. You fire up v0, throw in a few credits, and prompt your way to glory:
“Build me a dashboard that displays my monthly Slack admin analytics metrics from my real workspace.”
In the latter two approaches you’ll just need two things basically:
SLACK_TEAM_ID: you can find it here
SLACK_BOT_TOKEN: you'll get it once you create your Slack app, (you’ll just need to specify the right scopes for accessing resources)And voilà, you’ve (almost) nailed your Slack community understanding and reporting game!
What’s next
That’s a tough one as my brain explodes with new ideas almost every day. But jokes aside, next week we’ll wrap up this mini-series on community platform analytics with a look at Discord.
After that, we’ll dive into the world of developer marketing for a bit. I’m also toying with the idea of launching a shorter weekly writing format, something quick, useful, and easy to digest.
Stay tuned! 🫡