2021 Year in Review

Before 2022 gets too much older, I wanted to sit down and take a look at 2021 and see how the Community has fared.  

Lets start with the numbers:

Overall we continued to grow the community, with increases in almost all metrics.  I narrowed the focus down to the Q&A forums for this year's review since that is where the bulk of activity is, but even so we put up some impressive numbers for 2021, with 37,503,329 views and 12,893,266 unique visitors for the year.  

One area that I am particularly excited about is the increase of mobile traffic to our site.  When looking at the breakdown of desktop to mobile views/visits/visitors, we are seeing a steady but dramatic increase every year.  In 2021, we had 2,529,738 unique mobile visitors to the forums, which accounts for just under 20% of our total unique visitors.  This is fantastic because it tells us that not only are people on mobile finding the site, but that they are using it more and more each year.  And ultimately, that means we are there to help people out when and where they need it.  Period. 

2021 also saw the launch of our new Events forum, allowing us to share webinars, Twitter Spaces chats, town halls, and other events occurring across the QuickBooks ecosystem with our members.  We offered 320 events in 2021 and I am hoping that number only increases in 2022.  It's a great way for our members to find even more opportunities to learn about the program and how to succeed in their small business.  

We finished some redesign work on the site early last year to improve visibility of some features like Kudos and Accepted Solutions.  It definitely seems to have paid off for Kudos, the number of cheers given increased a whopping 24% from 2020 and we love to see the engagement and encouragement by members for others.  

Accepted Solutions, on the other hand, decreased year over year by about 13.5%.  However, that number isn't quite as alarming as it looks at first glance.  Knowing that we are leaning in to Accepted Solutions as a trusted source of knowledge for our customers, we began a program to have every solution that was marked as accepted reviewed by our tech team to ensure that it is correct.   During this audit they have unmarked about 9.7% of the solutions that came in during the year due to accuracy issues.   

We obviously still have some work to do on the Accepted Solutions interface (and probably some more education on why it's important to use) but overall I'm happy to know that the solutions that are in the Community are accurate, even if there are fewer of them.  And this will definitely be a focus for us this year.  

Alright, that's enough numbers.  Lets talk about some of the highlights in the community this year!

Our Community Champions continued to knock it out of the park this year.  Not only did they continue to answer questions, give and receive kudos, and author accepted solutions, this year we had several new contributions.  

Starting in January of 2021, Community Champion @lynda co-hosted an Ask the Expert live stream on our YouTube channel answering your payroll questions ahead of tax season.  

In May, Champion @SteveChase wrote a  detailed blog post about PayPal Integrations with QuickBooks  and followed it up by answering member questions in an AMA about PayPal Bank Feeds in QBO.  

@lynda came in clutch again just last month where she guest hosted on our Community Blog talking about the importance of taking care of yourself during these busy and stressful times of year.  Definitely make sure to check out her series on Stress Busters as you start gearing up for tax season.  

Of course our team here was also working hard behind the scenes to offer even more helpful content to the community, and we are pretty proud of what we accomplished.

We launched a product focused blog this year called Getting the Most out of QuickBooks.  If you haven't checked it out yet, I would definitely recommend giving it a quick look.  We not only have curated video playlists, collections of "Top 5" questions based on subject, and even a video series on how to run your business, but we recently published a lot of great Year-End specific content to help you out with January's taxes and forms.  

There was also our December AMA where QuickBooks Experts Mateo and Ali answered your questions about running and customizing reports.  

Just a few more callouts of things that might have slipped under your radar during 2021 before I let you go.

Did you know we put together a quick little 'choose your own adventure' type video to help welcome people to the Community?  

There is also now a Digital Resource Center that can help you navigate and learn where to go to get the most out of your time on Community.  

And finally, check out the videos we created to help you supercharge your search in Community , and how to write the best question so that you get the best answers.  

2021 was a heck of a year, but looking back at everything we accomplished, I am so proud to be part of this community.  And I absolutely can't wait to see what we can do together in 2022!