We all at one point took an anatomy class or at least some basic version of it. Remember head, shoulders, knees and toes from basic or primary school? Or that lesson about the 206 bones in a human body? No? Just me? Tough crowd.
When explaining Port's User Profile to my non-developer or non-devrel friends I like to think of it as an anatomy of the members in a developer community.
Now if you've read any of our previous articles on the Community Grid or Community Grid segments then you know quite a bit about what the basic outline of the User Profile looks like. If you haven't or you've somehow forgotten here's a refresher for you:
The User Profile
This is Leslie. Leslie is an Ethereum Developer we had the pleasure of meeting a few weeks ago when we spoke about the Adrift members in a community.
By their User Profile we can tell that Leslie usually engages with the community on Twitter or GitHub. They have a Port Score of 68 and they can be found in the Adrift segment of the Community Grid.
Solving DevRel Problems: Simplifying Community Management
When our founders were creating Port and were taking a look at community, they tried to attack some of the pain points of community managers by figuring out, how they could create a system of records that captures all the information that they needed to meet community managers' needs.
Nick says that:
Out of this Port’s segmentation tools were born. The Community Grid to give community managers an organized view of their community based on recency and frequency ; The Port Score to recognize high potential members and the User Profile to capture all this insight so that community managers could visualize all the data.
What our founders decided is that they wanted to keep the User Profile really simple. DevRel is hard enough. The tools advocates use don't have to be. So the User Profile was created with just a few boxes helping to show all the friendly faces behind communities, creating a portal for community professionals to look at their membership and see what really matters so they can develop the best strategies to grow, engage and retain their membership.
Of course there are other features in the full version of Port which provide an extra layer of insight when combined with the User Profile but what the User Profile really helps with is allowing you to recognize where this person is engaging; whether it be Stack Overflow or GitHub, how active they are in different parts of your community, what segment do they fall into, what is their Port Score, what valuable connections do they have and what exactly can you, as a community manager, do with all this information.
It’s a starting point to developing strategies built around the people in your community and how you engage or communicate with them to build better communities.
Here at Port, we are passionate about community which is why our Founders created the Community Grid and all the awesome features that come with it. Want to see the friendly faces behind your community? Take a moment to check out our free Community Grid tool. You can use it to check the health of your membership in less than five minutes!

And while you're at it, check out our Discord channel. We're a growing community of DevRel leaders and community managers. Whether you want to hop in and learn, add to the community, ask questions or just have some fun. We're more than happy to have you. What are you waiting for? Don't miss out! Join now!

Join the conversation