What is a Connection?
A Connection is a new metric in your weekly Community digest email, and will also soon be found in your University Dashboard. It measures genuine back-and-forth interaction between members of your Community - not just unique messages sent, but message exchanges between two students.
Connections only tracks exchanges between student members of your Community - ambassadors and staff/admins are not included in the Connection count.
A connection is counted whenever two people have each sent at least one message to one another: either in a direct message, a private group, or a thread within a Space. It's a way of tracking how much real relationship-building is happening in your Community, beyond simple activity counts.
How it's calculated
We track connections across three mediums:
Direct messages: one-to-one conversations
Private groups: group conversations within Community, self-created by students
Threads (Spaces): threaded conversations within a Space
A connection only counts once both students in the exchange have sent at least one message. A single unanswered message doesn't count as a connection - it takes two people messaging each other.
Examples
Scenario | Connections counted |
A direct message conversation where both people send at least one message | 1 connection |
A private group or thread with 3 participants, where 2 of the 3 send a message to each other | 2 connections |
A private group or thread where only 1 of several participants sends a message, and no one replies | 0 connections |
In a private group or thread within a Space, each qualifying pair of people who've exchanged a message is counted separately - so connections can rise quickly as a private group or Space becomes more active, since every new pair of members messaging each other adds to the total.
Where you'll see it
Connections appear in the Belonging pulse section of your weekly Community digest email, under New connections made. This figure shows how many new connections were made in the past week, with the percentage change versus the prior week, and a running total.
This sits alongside two related metrics in the same section:
Direct messages exchanged: the total volume of direct messages sent
Private group messages exchanged: the total volume of messages sent in private groups
While those two figures count raw message volume, New connections made counts something different: the number of new two-way relationships formed through that messaging activity.
Some FAQs
Does a connection count more than once? A specific pair of people forms one connection the first time they exchange a message with each other. Once that connection exists, further messages between the same two people don't add another connection - but a new message exchange with a different person will do.
Why is my connection count higher than my member count? In active private groups and Spaces threads, each pair of participants who exchange messages counts as a separate connection. A group of 5 active members can generate up to 10 possible connections (one for each pair), so totals can look high relative to headcount.
Does it matter which medium the messages were sent in? No, a connection is counted the same way whether it happens in a direct message, a private group, or a thread within a Space. The metric combines all three.
Why might this number be 0 for a quiet week? If no new two-way exchanges happened, for example, messages were sent but not replied to, no new connections are counted for that period, even if message volume elsewhere in the digest is greater than 0.