The five metrics a networking group should track — and the ones to skip.

1. Referrals given and received, per member

The flow metric. Group totals hide everything interesting — what matters is the distribution. In a healthy group of twenty, most members give at least one referral a month and nobody gives ten while five members give zero.

What to watch: members who receive plenty but rarely give (they may not know how to spot opportunities for others — a one-on-one usually fixes this faster than a talking-to), and members who give constantly but receive nothing (the group may not understand their business well enough to refer them).

2. Closed business reported from referrals

The outcome metric, and the one that justifies everyone's membership at renewal time. It is also the most under-reported number in every group, because reporting a closed deal weeks after it happened feels like bragging and takes effort.

Make it a norm, not a chore: the member who received the referral records the outcome and the amount when it closes, and the group celebrates the giver, not the closer. A group that closed $150,000 last year from internal referrals should be able to say so — with a report, not a guess.

3. Attendance and RSVP follow-through

The commitment metric. Raw attendance percentage is fine, but the sharper number is RSVP follow-through: of the people who said yes, who showed up? A member at 60% attendance is having a scheduling problem. A member who says yes and no-shows repeatedly is having a commitment problem — and those are different conversations.

Watch the trend, not the week. Attendance that slides from 90% to 75% over a quarter is a leading indicator: referral flow usually follows it down about two months later.

4. One-on-ones between members

The relationship-depth metric. Referrals follow trust, and trust is built in the coffee meetings between the official ones. Members who have done a one-on-one with most of the group refer more and get referred more — they simply know enough about each other's businesses to spot the opportunities.

A workable target: every member pairs with every other member at least once a year, and new members do their first three one-on-ones in their first month. Log them somewhere both participants get credit, or they quietly stop happening.

5. Guests invited, and guests who join

The growth metric, in two parts. Guests invited tells you whether members are proud enough of the group to bring people. Guests who join tells you whether the meeting they saw was worth joining. A group with many guests and few joins has a meeting problem; a group with few guests has a pride problem — and they need different fixes.

The step most groups skip: following up with a guest within 72 hours of their visit. Track who owns each follow-up, or every promising visitor becomes 'whatever happened to that insurance guy?'

The metrics to skip

• Referral quotas — a required number per month trains members to pass junk. Track flow, discuss outliers privately, skip the quota.
• Public leaderboards as discipline — visibility is good; shame is corrosive. Show members their own numbers and the group totals, and let leaders see the rest.
• 'Thank-you dollars' theater — closed-business totals announced without a system behind them drift toward fiction. If the number isn't built from recorded outcomes, don't announce it.
• Anything requiring a separate reporting chore — if a metric needs members to fill out a weekly form, it will die. Track what happens as a side effect of normal use.

Put the five on one page

The test of a good metric set is that a leader can review it in ten minutes a month and know exactly which two conversations to have. Five numbers, per member and for the group, over a rolling period — that's the whole dashboard a networking group needs.