Translating Community Into ROI By Mapping Engagement To Business Results

Modern workplaces have more communication tools than ever before. But despite the endless Slack channels, Zoom rooms, and intranets, many teams still operate in silos. Managers often know that trust and belonging matter, but when budget season rolls around, they struggle to put a dollar value on those abstract concepts, and so investing in community falls to the wayside. For many leaders, justifying a community program means translating soft sentiments into hard math and building a business case for belonging.

Jae Washington, Owner and Lead Consultant at Birdie in the Hand, knows how to solve that equation. With over 20 years of experience building communities, she treats internal community as core infrastructure rather than a nice-to-have perk. During her tenure as Head of Community for Enterprise Experiences at Headspace, her strategies generated more than $500,000 in ROI, improved enterprise retention, and reduced support volume. Now, Washington helps organizations map human connection directly to their bottom lines.

“When you look at the data in isolation, you miss the impact; community is the sum of all its parts working together. Community is the glue that connects engagement, behavior change, and business outcomes into something organizations can actually measure and act on,” says Washington. The fix starts with a three-tiered funnel. Washington advises teams to progress from baseline engagement indicators like event attendance into deeper behavioral metrics, such as internal tool adoption. Eventually, those behaviors culminate in hard business outcomes like reduced friction and improved retention signals.

• Three layers: “When we talk about community, you can always start at engagement indicators like participation in live workshops or community discussions. But there is a second layer that I really like to dig into, especially with some of my behavioral and mental health coaching training. Behavior adoption signals like deeper product utilization and faster time to value are very strong indicators of a community’s impact. Finally, we can tie it directly to business outcomes like improved retention signals or increased advocacy,” explains Washington.

• Compounding effects: Proving exactly what moves the needle is a classic attribution challenge. For teams with tight budgets or limited bandwidth, a tiered approach keeps the work manageable while giving leadership enough evidence to make decisions. Looking at a single metric in isolation often obscures the real picture. A modest bump in workshop attendance, combined with deeper adoption of an HR portal tends to coincide with fewer IT tickets. The power of community usually shows up in these compounding effects, rather than in one standalone number. “A tiered or scalable approach to community and its value to me works best in organizations where dollars and cents matter.”

Making this strategy stick then requires embedding community directly into the employee lifecycle rather than treating it as an afterthought. Washington relies on a structured 90‑day playbook that prioritizes cross-functional alignment and the alleviation of nuanced challenges before anyone rushes to plan a social event. She looks for points of highest value to introduce community—such as onboarding or early manager enablement—and then measures outcomes to recalibrate as the organization scales.

• Recalculating corporate culture: “Community is about support. It’s about creating the infrastructure that helps employees navigate the organization. Community provides a tangible business case for addressing employee needs in a way that feels less transactional and more partner-rooted,” Washington says.

• Spreadsheets over pizza parties: “The first step is all about listening and learning, finding out the priorities of the organization—what sort of outcomes they are looking for—reviewing previous engagement metrics or community experiences and auditing existing resources, meeting with those cross-functional partners because they are also a window to their end user.”

Ultimately, Washington treats community as a foundational part of the organizational ecosystem, sitting alongside product and operations rather than underneath them. Applying the same rigorous measurement to internal human connections that companies apply to sales pipelines offers a practical way to keep teams aligned. Marrying modern digital tools with human-centric infrastructure simply makes good business sense.

“Community plays a critical role in creating the stickiness, the synergy, the connective tissue of an organization’s overall strategy for growth and for ROI,” concludes Washington. “The old and the new together create success. Community paired with technology is what turns relationships into real, scalable business value.”