Contact Initiated Activity

Last updated Aug 28th, 2024

Overview

Common Room provides precise insights about Contact engagement in your community by differentiating between activities that are Contact initiated and those that are received by Contacts. We make this distinction because activities taken by a Contact are better indicators of intent and provide more actionable data for you to use.

Activities that are received by Contacts — like when someone receives a marketing email — can skew metrics and make it difficult to gauge genuine Contact engagement.

This means that by default, Common Room uses Contact initiated activities wherever activity can be displayed (although you can still manually see activities received by Contacts in some cases).

Below is an overview of the various ways that Contact initiated activity is used in Common Room.

How Contact Initiated Activity is Used

Contacts

The most recent Contact activity that’s displayed uses Contact initiated activity by default.

When you look at a Contact's profile or their activity, only data that comes from Contact initiated activity will be used by default. This default is used across various fields and data points in Contact profiles and activity.

Fields

Fields are properties you can track on Contact or Organization profiles. Contact initiated activity is used to inform multiple fields in Common Room, including the following.

FieldDefinition
First active
The first date of Contact initiated activity in the community captured in Common Room.
Last active
The most recent date of Contact initiated activity in the community captured in Common Room.
Activity level
How active a Contact is across your community relative to other Contacts.
Activity count
The number of interactions Contacts have had with your brand across all connected signals.
Activity between
A customizable date range for when a Contact was last active in your community.
90-day activity
A field displayed in Organizations that measures an organization’s activity within the last 90 days

As of July 21, 2023, two fields are actively undergoing changes. The First seen field is still available as a filter and can be added as a column in segments, but is no longer a default column for Contacts, Organizations, Segments, and data exports. Additionally, the Last seen field is being deprecated; it's no longer used by default and will be removed from Common Room in late 2023.

In the example below, the First active and Last active fields are visible on an organization profile. The data shown for each field uses Contact initiated activity by default.

Filters

Filters are a property of any Contact, Activity, or Organization within Common Room by which data can be organized. A new filter — Activity Origin — allows you to filter ContactS, Segments, Activities, and Organizations by Contact Initiated or Received by Contact.

For example, the table below shows activity types that are tracked by our Zapier integration, and whether or not that activity is Contact initiated or received by Contact.

SignalContact Activity TypeActivity OriginShown by Default
HubSpot
Completed a training
Contact initiated
✅ Yes
HubSpot
Received a marketing email
Received by Contact
❌ No
LinkedIn
Reacted to a post
Contact initiated
✅ Yes
Manual entry
Imported via CSM
Received by Contact
❌ No
Slack
Replied to a message
Contact initiated
✅ Yes
Slack
Posted to a channel
Contact initiated
✅ Yes

Reporting

Reporting gives you tools to show the impact of community to your business, measure the health and growth of your community programs, and easily save and share reports with stakeholders. Activities received by Contacts will be excluded from underlying data in reports, including:

Report MetricDefinition
Total engagement rate
The percentage of your Contacts who are actively engaging in your community.
Total activity
A summary of where Contacts are engaging across your community.
Total active Contacts
The total number of active Contacts in your community.
Most active Contact
The most active Contact, which platforms they are active on, what their total activity count is, and where they were last active.
Activity by signal
The total activity count — broken down by signal — so you can see where your community is engaging.
Sentiment
The summary of positive and negative sentiment across all your community activity, by this Contact cohort, in a given time period.

Additionally, reports will default to exclude any signals that primarily contain data for activities received by Contacts (for example, Hubspot). These signals can be selected from the Signals menu to add them back to your report.

If you’d like to create reports that include these types of signals by default, click here to learn how to save reports.

CRM and data exports

Our CRM widgets, fields synced to CRM signals, and data exports use Contact initiated activity by default.

SurfaceContact Activity
In Contact and organization profiles, the Common Room widget will show First Active, Last Active, and any associated signals based on Contact initiated activities.
In Contact and organization profiles, the Common Room widget will show First Active and Last Active. The Activity feed will only show Contact initiated activities.
CSV exports from Common Room will use First Active, Last Active, and any associated signals based on Contact initiated activities. Fields such as Activity level, Activity count, and Active between will be based only on Contact initiated activities.

FAQ

What is a Contact initiated activity versus activities received by Contacts?

In short: Contact initiated activities are active, and activities received by Contacts are passive. A Contact initiated activity is any action that a real Contact of your community has taken, while an activity received by Contacts are something that happened to a Contact. Some examples of activities initiated by non-Contacts include marketing or promotional emails, data that’s been imported from your CRM, or any activity that wasn’t taken by an actual Contact.

Why doesn’t Common Room track activities received by Contacts by default?

Activities taken by a Contact are better indicators of intent — meaning they actively chose that activity — and provide more actionable data for you to use. By focusing on only Contact initiated activity, you’ll be able to have a clearer picture of the actual activity in your community.

Can I still see activities received by Contacts in Common Room?

Yes. The Activity origin filter can be used to show activities received by Contacts in your community, which will include member imports, marketing emails, or messages received.

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