This is the latest post in my series on user retention on Hive, and a direct follow-up to yesterday's post about onboarding. In that I presented the data on user onboarding network wide, and tried to determine if users perform better and/or are more likely to stay with Hive depending on what account created theirs.

In today's post I will take a narrower focus and look at one on-boarding project. As far as I'm aware, OCD on-boarding project is the only one of its kind on Hive, where volunteers (whom are first vetted) are incentivized to encourage users to join using a referral system. These referrals get embedded in the metadata of the transaction that creates the new user's account, which allows the incentive system to work and also allows us to extract the data for some retrospective analytics.

Overall Stats

Here are the overall stats for the OCD program, with some network averages for comparison.

	Volunteers	Onboarded Users	Became Active First Month	Second Month Retention	Third Month Retention
Overall	60	745	548	345	210
Rate		12.4 per Volunteer	73.56%	62.96%	38.32%
Network Averages			16%	37%	27%

How Onboarded Users Performed on Hive

Since they joined, users onboarded by the OCD initiative have made 12,637 posts for a combined author reward of $53,692. The average author reward per post by an OCD onboarded user is $4.25, compared to about $1 network-wide. I have not gone to this level of depth, but it may be interesting to compare post length, votes and comments per post in the future.

Here are some charts showing the activity of users onboarded by OCD. First is monthly active authors, followed by posts per month, then author rewards per month. Each element is colour-coded according to the OCD volunteer that onboarded them.

Keep in mind that for most of the period below, Hive userbase, posts per month etc. were in decline.

Individual Volunteer Performance

Finally, let's look at how many users each volunteer has onboarded individually, how many of them made a post in first month, and how many users were retained into second and third months.

We can also look at the rates for the top 10 volunteers.

Referrer	Total Onboarded	First Month Active Rate	Second Month Active Rate	Third Month Active Rate
@soy-laloreto	124	82.26%	63.73%	38.24%
@starstrings01	68	77.94%	73.58%	52.83%
@readthisplease	48	2.08%	100.00%	100.00%
@dodovietnam	42	88.10%	78.38%	32.43%
@dimascastillo90	39	61.54%	66.67%	25.00%
@laloretoyya	37	86.49%	62.50%	50.00%
@feanorgu	35	54.29%	26.32%	36.84%
@tpkidkai	33	81.82%	66.67%	48.15%
@merit.ahama	29	48.28%	50.00%	28.57%
@samostically	23	60.87%	71.43%	50.00%

Conclusion

The users onboarded by OCD volunteers have much higher performance on Hive as well as much higher retention rates than the community as a whole. The initiative is limited in scale, but the users onboarded have an outsized impact. The overall group of active onboarded authors has plateaued after the first few months, but this is in the broader context of Hive user activity declining overall.

It is likely that the approach of volunteer on-boarding somewhat mitigates the problems Hive has that lead to low user retention. Questions remains of scale and scalability.

1. Current scale is still quite small. Can it be scaled up?
2. Will it still be as effective at scale?
3. Are there any costs to this method of onboarding that will emerge at scale?

Thank you for reading, and I hope that you found some worthwhile insights in the data presented here.

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