How To Calculate Weekly Active Users in Blackbaud | Arithmix

Calculating weekly active users is an important metric for any business or organization that wants to track user engagement and retention. In this article, we'll discuss what weekly active users are, why they're valuable to calculate, and how you can calculate them for your own organization.

What Is Weekly Active Users?

Weekly active users (WAU) is a metric that measures the number of unique users who have engaged with your product or service within a given week. This metric is commonly used in the tech industry to track user engagement and retention, as it provides a snapshot of how many users are actively using your product or service on a regular basis.

WAU is different from daily active users (DAU), which measures the number of unique users who have engaged with your product or service within a given day. While DAU can be a useful metric for tracking short-term engagement, WAU provides a more comprehensive view of user engagement over time.

When Is It Valuable To Calculate Weekly Active Users?

Calculating weekly active users can be valuable for any business or organization that wants to track user engagement and retention over time. By tracking WAU, you can get a sense of how many users are actively using your product or service on a regular basis, and whether that number is increasing or decreasing over time.

WAU can also be useful for identifying trends and patterns in user behavior. For example, if you notice a spike in WAU after releasing a new feature or product, you can infer that users are responding positively to that change. Conversely, if you notice a decrease in WAU over time, you may need to investigate why users are disengaging and take steps to address those issues.

How to Calculate Weekly Active Users

Calculating weekly active users is a relatively simple process. First, you'll need to define what constitutes an "active user" for your organization. This could be any number of actions, such as logging in, making a purchase, or engaging with a specific feature.

Once you've defined what constitutes an active user, you'll need to track how many unique users engage in that activity within a given week. This can be done using a variety of tools, such as Google Analytics or custom tracking scripts.

Once you have this data, you can calculate your weekly active users by simply adding up the number of unique users who engaged in the activity within the past week.

For example, let's say you define an active user as someone who has logged into your website within the past week. If you have 1,000 unique users who logged in during that time period, your weekly active users would be 1,000.

By tracking weekly active users over time, you can get a sense of how engaged your user base is and whether your efforts to improve engagement are having an impact.

Conclusion

Tracking weekly active users is a valuable metric for any business or organization that wants to track user engagement and retention over time. By defining what constitutes an active user, tracking user engagement, and calculating weekly active users, you can get a comprehensive view of how many users are actively using your product or service on a regular basis.

How Do You Calculate Weekly Active Users in Blackbaud

Blackbaud itself isn’t naturally geared towards letting you calculate complex metrics like Weekly Active Users. As an alternative, teams typically use products like Arithmix to import data from Blackbaud and build out dashboards.

What is Arithmix?

Arithmix is the next generation spreadsheet - a collaborative, web-based platform for working with numbers that’s powerful yet easy to use. With Arithmix you can import data from systems like Blackbaud, combine it with data from other systems, and create calculations like Weekly Active Users.

In Arithmix, data is organized into Tables and referenced by name, not by cell location like a spreadsheet, simplifying calculation creation. Data and calculations can be shared with others and re-used like building blocks, vastly streamlining analysis, model building, and reporting in a highly scalable and easy to maintain platform. Data can be edited, categorized (by dimensions) and freely pivoted. Calculations are automatically copied across a dimension - eliminating copy and paste of formulas.

Arithmix is fully collaborative, giving your entire team access to your numbers and the ability to work together seamlessly.

Calculating Weekly Active Users in Arithmix

Calculating metrics like Weekly Active Users is simple in Arithmix. Once you've created your free account, you’ll be able to import your Blackbaud data, and use it to create natural language formulas for metrics like Weekly Active Users.

Arithmix is designed to give you the power to build any calculations you want on top of your Blackbaud data, while also being easy to use and collaborate on. You can share your dashboards with users inside and outside of your organisation, making it easy to empower your whole team.