Community Survey Template
A health check for your community: participation levels, where the value hides, how welcoming it feels from the edge, and what members are missing.
Whether you post daily or joined last week and lurked — especially if you lurked — this five-question check-up shapes what the community becomes next.
Every community looks healthy from the inside because the people you hear from are, by definition, the engaged ones. The silent 90 percent — lurkers, drifters, the quietly disappointed — are invisible in your activity feed and decisive for your future. A community survey is the only tool that samples them, which is why this one's intro explicitly courts lurkers and why its questions are built to be answerable by someone who has never posted.
Reading the engagement ladder. Tenure crossed with participation level is the diagnostic core. A healthy community shows movement up the ladder — readers becoming commenters becoming posters as tenure grows. When two-year members still "mostly read", the ladder is broken somewhere, and the welcomingness scale usually says where: its anchors run from "cliquey" to "very welcoming" because cliquishness is the specific failure mode of maturing communities, felt keenly at the edges and invisible from the center. Filter the welcome score by tenure under three months — that number is your front door.
Value and advocacy. The value question caps picks at two, forcing members to reveal what actually keeps them — communities habitually over-invest in content and under-invest in "the people I have met", and this question exposes that. The invited-anyone question is behavioral NPS: invitations are advocacy that already happened, not advocacy hypothetically promised. And the missing-what question is phrased for builders — rituals, channels, reasons to show up — because "what is missing" produces roadmaps where "any feedback?" produces shrugs.
The punchline option is real data. "I had honestly forgotten I joined" reads like a gag and is actually your quiet-churn rate — people still on the roster and functionally gone. Cross it with tenure to find when the forgetting happens; if it concentrates at three to twelve months, onboarding worked and the middle of the journey is where belonging leaks.
What we left out. Satisfaction grids (engagement ladders say more with less), demographic questions (identity-adjacent questions in small communities feel surveillance-y), and names — anonymity is what lets someone admit they had forgotten they joined.
Who runs this. Community managers of Slack and Discord spaces, membership-site founders ahead of a pricing change, open-source maintainers reading contributor weather, and local clubs choosing next season's programming.
Make it yours. Rename the value options to your actual spaces and rituals. Post the link where lurkers will see it — a pinned message, not a busy thread — and password-protect it if the community is private. Share results back openly with one commitment attached. Then rerun quarterly and watch the tenure-versus-participation cross-tab in the CSV export; the ladder starting to move is what community health looks like in data.
Frequently asked questions
How do I get lurkers to answer, not just power users?
Pin the link where reading happens rather than posting it into an active thread, and keep the intro’s explicit invitation to lurkers. Anonymity does the rest — there are no identity fields.
Can I keep non-members from filling it in?
Set a form password in Settings and share it inside the community only. Duplicate prevention per device keeps enthusiastic members from double-submitting.
What is the single most important cut of the data?
Welcomingness scored by members under three months, and participation level by tenure. Both come straight out of the CSV export as two-column pivots.
Should results be shared with the community?
Yes — openly, with one concrete change attached. Communities that see their survey change something answer the next one at double the rate.