What is a community portfolio review?

It is a structured assessment of the services and programmes a community team operates. It examines their customer purpose, delivery quality, resources and relationships, then makes decisions about continuing or changing them. Its focus is the whole set of commitments rather than the performance of one event or discussion area.

Who should attend a community portfolio review?

Include the programme owners, people with relevant customer evidence and those authorised to make the resource decisions. Support, product, customer success or education colleagues may be needed depending on the services involved. Keep attendance focused on the decisions rather than inviting every interested stakeholder to every review.

Which metrics belong in a quarterly portfolio review?

Use measures linked to each service's purpose, alongside reliability, resource use and unresolved work. Reach and participation can provide context, but they do not establish usefulness alone. Add customer examples and explain evidence limitations, especially when discussing retention or financial outcomes that have several possible causes.

Should a low-activity programme be closed?

Not automatically. Check whether the intended audience is small, whether the service is discoverable and whether participants achieve something valuable. Low activity can indicate weak demand, poor delivery or a deliberately narrow service. Compare its usefulness and resource needs with realistic alternatives before deciding.

How do you prevent a review becoming a reporting exercise?

Start with explicit decisions, bring the people authorised to make them and finish with owners and next steps. Review whether previous decisions were implemented and useful. Limit descriptive updates to evidence that helps resolve a choice, and keep unresolved questions specific enough to investigate before the next review.

Run a Quarterly Community Portfolio Review

Decide which community services to continue, improve, combine or retire using customer needs, capacity and evidence.

Published: 14 October 2026
Topics: Portfolio review, Programme management, Community strategy

A quarterly community portfolio review decides which services deserve continued effort, which need improvement and which should change or end. Compare customer needs, delivery quality, resource demands and overlap across programmes, then assign owners to the resulting decisions. The review should change how work is prioritised, not merely summarise the previous quarter.

A customer community can accumulate programmes faster than it retires them. An expert session, a private group and a feedback initiative may each seem reasonable, while together they exceed the team's capacity. A portfolio review gives you a way to assess the whole commitment rather than defending every activity separately.

Define the decisions the review must support

Begin by listing the decisions that need to be made. Perhaps a pilot needs a permanent owner, two programmes serve the same audience or a recurring service no longer has reliable cover. Bring those questions into the review explicitly. Otherwise, the meeting can become a sequence of updates with no clear reason for anyone to act.

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