Your panel total makes a great slide. It makes a poor planning tool. Running a regular panel health check is what actually reveals whether your members are ready to respond.
Pop quiz: three questions your panel total can’t answer
Ready? Pretend you’re the panel manager on a busy Tuesday. No spreadsheets, no pinging a colleague, no peeking at last month’s report. Three questions. Go.
- Question one. Of the people who joined your QuestionPro Communities panel last quarter, how many have verified their email?
- Question two. Who hasn’t done anything lately?
- Question three. Is a reward request still waiting from your last research wave?
How did that feel? If you answered all three without opening a single tab, take a bow. Most of us shrug and give a number. “We’ve got a big panel” is a lovely thing to say. It just doesn’t tell you much.
Here’s the good news. Those answers already exist. They’re sitting in your community, waiting for someone to put them side by side.
That’s the job of the community dashboard. You’ll also hear it called community statistics, or the community health dashboard. Same report, different nicknames. It puts growth, profile readiness, participation, rewards, and portal and app usage in one place, so the next brief doesn’t catch you guessing.
Let’s get you to full marks.
Learn More: Watch the community dashboard walkthrough in the QuestionPro help center
What is the community dashboard?
The community dashboard is a report inside QuestionPro Communities that connects how your panel is growing with how ready and active its members are, and how they experience rewards and access. You’ll find it by opening Communities, choosing your community, then going to analytics.
Four tabs do the work: member acquisition and profile readiness, member engagements, rewards, and sessions. Summary cards sit across the top. A date filter runs from the last 24 hours to the last year, with a custom range for when you care about one specific research wave.
If you manage your members through panel management software already, think of community statistics as the place where you step back and read the whole panel at once.
Three things it isn’t, so nobody gets surprised:
- It isn’t a crystal ball. An at-risk member is someone with no recorded activity in the period you picked. It doesn’t predict who will leave, and it doesn’t change anyone’s member status.
- It isn’t a mailer. Saving a group of members as a filter sends nothing. You complete follow-up in the usual Communities workflows.
- It isn’t an eligibility check. A profile field with high completion means an answer exists. Whether that answer fits your study is still your call.
A guided tour, one tab at a time
Start at the top of the community health dashboard and work across. Each tab answers a different question.
Member acquisition and profile readiness: who joined, and are they ready?
Four summary cards give you the lay of the land. Sign-ups are members who registered in your chosen period. Verified members have completed email verification. Active members have at least one recorded activity. At-risk members have none.
Click any card to see the list behind it, with member ID, name, email, and status. The information icon on each card gives you the exact definition, which is handy when you’re explaining the numbers to someone else.
One small habit worth building: read the comparison label next to each card. In the current report, it says the change is measured against the previous 30 days, even if you’ve picked a different range. Don’t assume it moves with your filter.
Below the cards, the member source chart shows where people came from, with counts and percentages for routes such as web, qualifying survey, and upload. Click a source to see the people behind it.
This is where a recruitment review gets interesting. If uploads make up most of your growth, that’s the group to open before you plan your next audience. Did those members finish onboarding? Has anyone asked them about the things your studies need? Source volume is only one part of the story, so check eligibility and participation before you decide which route brings better members. Your member referral tracking can add detail on web sign-ups.
Then comes the profile quality panel. You get an overall completion percentage, plus completion counts for each profile field in your community. Click a field to see who’s behind the number, and use the arrows to move through the rest.
Start with the fields your next study will filter on. Say a brief asks for people who bought a car in the last two years. You’d go straight to the field that captures when someone bought their vehicle. If completion is low, you now know exactly whom to ask, and what to ask them. You don’t have to chase every field from every member. If you gather those answers through profiling surveys, you can plan that request with the gap in front of you.
Member engagements: What do people actually show up for?
The activity breakdown shows total recorded actions across surveys, polls, topics, and ideaboards. The activity trends chart shows how participation moves over time, grouped weekly, monthly, or quarterly, for all activity or one type.
Pick a type and the metrics change to fit it. Surveys show invitations sent, responses, and participation rate. Polls show invitations, votes cast, and participation rate. Topics and ideaboards show interactions, comments, likes, dislikes, and participation rate. A participation rate means something different for a poll than for a discussion, so read each one on its own terms.
Next, the member activity heatmap lays activity out by day and hour. Darker cells mean more recorded activity. Start with the overall view, then switch to the type you’re planning, because surveys might peak at a different time from discussions.
The busiest hour in your history is a good place to run a test. It isn’t a promise.
Scroll further, and you’ll find the engagement drivers and engaged members panels. The first ranks the activities that drew the most participation. The second ranks members by their engagement counts, with top 5, top 10, or top 20 views.
You can use these two ways. Spot dependable contributors and recognize them. And check whether a handful of names carry most of your feedback, which is a prompt to plan something for the quieter members too. If you’re thinking about what to offer, your polls, topics, and ideaboards are all set up in Communities.
Rewards: What happens after the thank-you?
The rewards tab keeps the experience after participation in the same review as everything else.
The reward approval activity panel shows requests raised in your period, grouped by their current status: approved, rejected, or pending. The reward inventory and distribution panel shows the amount and items used and remaining, how many members are eligible, and how many have redeemed. The redemption rate shows what share of eligible members redeemed, and the top earner highlight shows who’s leading on points.
There’s one detail worth knowing. Only redemptions that need approval or vendor confirmation create approval requests. Instant redemptions show up under inventory and distribution instead. So zero requests doesn’t mean zero redemptions.
Before your next wave, check pending requests and what’s left in inventory. If redemption is quieter than you’d like, check eligibility, the relevance of the rewards on offer, and how easy redeeming feels before you change anything.
Sessions: How are members getting in?
The sessions tab covers the portal and mobile app. The sessions card counts one member on one channel on one day as a single session, however many times they visit. Portal sessions and mobile app sessions break that down, and the mobile app view splits into Android, iOS, and device not reported.
The sessions over time chart lets you switch between all channels, portal, and mobile app. Below it, the unique members by channel view counts distinct people for the whole period: total unique members, portal members, mobile app members, and members who used both.
Why both measures? A member who logs in to the portal on three separate days adds three sessions but only one unique portal member. Sessions show how often people come in. Unique members show how many different people do. And because some people use both channels, don’t add portal members and app members together, or you’ll count them twice.
Two honest notes. A visit shows someone came in, not that they finished a survey. And mobile app tracking in this report starts on September 11, 2026, so mobile figures count from that date even if your selected range starts earlier. Check the tracking notice before you compare channels.
From finding to follow-up: save the group
Spotting an issue is half the job. Losing track of who it applies to is how the other half goes missing.
You can save a group of members from a summary card, a recruitment source, or a profile field list:
- Click the card, source, or field to open its member list.
- Tick individual members, or use the header checkbox for the whole list, and check the selected-member count.
- Click Save as filter.
- Give it a name a colleague would understand in three weeks, then click save filter.
Good names say what the group is and why you saved it. Think “Recent sign-ups, onboarding review” or “Uploaded members, October review.” If a date goes in the name, make sure it matches the period you were looking at.
Remember that saving doesn’t send anything. When you’re ready to act, continue with the usual workflows, such as sending a new invitation. Before you invite a saved group to research, check study eligibility and recent contact history.
Then do the part no dashboard can do for you. Agree who owns the follow-up, and when you’ll look at the result.
Three scenarios from the panel manager’s desk
These are illustrative workflows, not customer results. They show how the pieces fit together.
The brief that wants something new
An automotive brand gets a brief for people who bought a car in the last two years. Earlier waves never asked about purchase timing.
The panel manager opens the profile quality panel and finds the field. Completion is low. She clicks through to see the members who haven’t filled it in, saves them as “Purchase timing, profile request,” and plans a short, focused request to that group.
A surprise at launch has become a task with a name and a date. Whether the answers match the brief is still something she checks later, against the actual responses.
The recruitment burst
A consumer brand adds a big batch of members by upload ahead of a busy quarter. The sign-up total looks fantastic.
In the member source chart, uploads account for a large share. The manager clicks upload, scans the statuses, notices a good number haven’t verified their email, and checks profile completion for the same group. She saves the members as “Uploaded members, onboarding review” and plans an onboarding message and a profile request.
The investment in recruitment now has a plan attached to it.
The quiet stretch between waves
A telecom brand’s community hums around its big survey launches, then goes still in between. The activity trends chart shows the pattern clearly, with spikes at launch and a flat line after.
The community manager checks the heatmap and sees that poll activity tends to cluster in the evening. She decides on one test: a short poll, sent at that time, on something members have opinions about. She picks a date to review who took part.
No promise of a fixed uplift. Just one purposeful experiment and a way to read the result.
And one more use, a quieter one. Take a monthly client or leadership review. The community statistics give everyone the same starting point. The conversation moves from “how big is the panel” to “what do we do next.”
The advantages of the community dashboard
The practical payoff comes down to a handful of things:
- A shared view of the panel behind the plan.
Panel managers, community managers, and research teams look at the same picture.
- Earlier attention to profile and onboarding work.
Gaps show up while there’s still time to collect the information.
- Sharper priorities.
You see which member groups and which operational questions deserve this week’s effort.
- Evidence for engagement experiments.
Your own participation patterns guide your choices on timing and format.
- Attention to the member experience.
Rewards and channel use are in the same review as recruitment and participation.
- Member groups you can return to.
Saved filters keep the people connected to a finding.
- More concrete conversations.
“Our engagement feels flat” becomes “Here’s the group, here’s the test.”
None of this happens on its own. The community health dashboard doesn’t promise a fixed lift in participation or a guaranteed audience. It gives your team something specific to act on, and you judge the results against your own records.
When to use it, and when not to
It works best when you run an ongoing research community or panel and have a decision to make about it. Maybe you’re expanding recruitment, planning a busy run of studies, or watching audience requirements change from brief to brief. Maybe you’re investing in rewards or in your portal and mobile experience, or you want a regular panel review that leads to action.
It offers less value for a one-off survey with no established community, or for a program with little recorded activity and no recurring need for panel management.
And be clear about what you’re asking of it. If you need a guaranteed audience count, a churn forecast, automated outreach, causal analysis, or a calculated return on investment, those need separate work. It isn’t a replacement for full survey analysis either. Think of it as your read on community operations and readiness.
A five-step panel check you can run this week
Open Communities, select your community, go to analytics, then open the community dashboard. Pick a date range that fits your question: a short one after a launch, a monthly one for a regular review, or a custom range for a specific research wave.
Then work through this:
- Recruitment and onboarding. Compare sign-ups with your goals, and look at verification and any source groups that need follow-up.
- Research readiness. Check the profile fields behind your next study’s criteria.
- Participation. Read the trends, look into anything unexpected, and choose an activity or timing test.
- Member experience. Review pending reward requests, inventory, and portal and app usage.
- Follow-through. Choose a few actions, assign owners, and review the results in the next period.
Keep each action tied to a finding, and check what happened before you repeat it.
Get started
Your next brief is somewhere on the calendar already. Open the community statistics, pick one question to answer before that study, and see what your panel tells you.
New to QuestionPro Communities? Create your community and start building a panel you can return to. Want to see it with your own scenario? Ask your account admin or request a demo.
Thinking about the bigger picture of what a research community can do for a program? This piece on building high-performing research communities beyond panel size covers the strategy side. For the basics, read how to build an online community panel that actually engages.
Frequently asked questions
It’s a report inside QuestionPro Communities, also known as community statistics or the community health dashboard. It brings member growth, recruitment sources, profile readiness, participation, rewards, and portal and mobile app usage into one place. Panel managers use it to see what the community needs before the next study, investigate the member groups behind a finding, and save selected members as filters.
Open Communities, select your community, go to Analytics, and choose Community Dashboard. Start with the summary cards at the top, then pick the tab that matches your task: member acquisition and profile readiness, member engagement, rewards, or sessions. A date filter lets you choose anything from the last 24 hours to the last year, or a custom range.
An at-risk member is someone with no recorded activity during the period you selected. It isn’t a prediction that they’ll leave, and it doesn’t change their member status. They might have joined recently, or might not have had a relevant opportunity yet. Check their situation before you plan any follow-up.
No. Completion shows that information is available in a field, not that the answer fits your audience. Actual answers, study criteria, member status, and your contact rules still decide who qualifies. Use completion to find which information gaps to fill before you build an audience, then check the answers themselves.
They give you evidence for better engagement decisions, but they don’t promise a fixed uplift. Use the activity trends, the heatmap, and the engagement rankings to choose one specific test, such as a short poll at a busier time. Run it, review who took part, and judge the result against your own goals.
No. The dashboard is for reporting, investigation, and member selections. Saving a filter sends no message. You send communications, process rewards, and prepare audiences in the relevant Communities workflows. Before you invite a saved group to research, review study eligibility and recent contact history.
Sessions count daily activity: one member on one channel on one day is one session; however many times they visit. Unique members count how many different people were active in the period. A member who uses the portal on three separate days adds three sessions but only one unique portal member. Don’t add portal and app members together, since some people use both.
Ask whether your current analytics connect panel conditions to the studies you’re planning and the members you’ll follow up with. The community dashboard sits inside QuestionPro Communities, covers recruitment through rewards and app usage, and lets you save selected members as filters. Try it on your next brief and see whether it gives your team a clearer starting point.
