The honest first answer is: less than you hope, in more places than you think.
Most owners ask this question because a community feels quiet and the member count says it should not be. Both things are usually true at once. Your members are busy, they are in several Skool communities, and yours is competing for a slice of attention that was never going to be a hundred percent.
Here is what they are actually doing, split into the part you can see and the part you cannot.
What are most of my members actually doing all day?
Most of your members are reading and never posting, because in almost every community the large majority consume rather than contribute. That is not a failure of your community, it is the shape of every group of humans ever assembled. A small share create, a larger share respond, and most just consume.
This matters because it changes what "doing something" means. A member who logs in twice a week, reads three posts and never comments is a member who is getting value. They renew. They recommend you. They do not show up in any engagement count you have.
So when you ask what your members are doing, the accurate answer for most of them is: quietly getting what they came for. The work is not converting all of them into posters. It is finding the handful for whom the silence means something different.
What can I see my members doing from inside my own community?
From inside your own community you can see four member behaviours — posts, comments, poll votes and presence — and member behaviour comes down to that small observable set:
- Posts. Rare, high-signal. A member who starts a thread is invested.
- Comments. The workhorse metric. Most real participation lives here.
- Poll votes. Low-effort but genuine — a poll vote is a deliberate act, unlike a like.
- Presence. Whether they have been around recently at all, independent of whether they said anything.
Skoolgrades counts engagement as comments plus polls and does not use likes, because likes are close to free and tell you very little about investment. See what member behaviors matter for more on why that line is drawn there.
That same choice sets the headline number: Skoolgrades reports a participation rate, built from things a member actually did — comments, replies, poll votes — rather than page loads, which is why it lands below a visit-based engagement rate (the gap between those two definitions). For a question about what your members are doing, the definition that requires them to have done something is the only one worth reading.
Presence is the one owners under-use. A member who is showing up and reading but not participating needs a completely different approach from a member who has stopped opening the community at all. The first one needs an easier on-ramp. The second one needs a reason to come back.
What can't I see my members doing?
What you cannot see is everything your members do in the rest of the Skool network, because Skool is not a collection of isolated rooms but a network with shared members. Your people are almost certainly in other communities — free ones, paid ones, some in your niche, plenty nowhere near it.
That means a member who looks completely disengaged to you may be one of the most active people on the platform. They post daily. They answer questions. They start threads. Just not in your room.
Your own admin area cannot tell you this, and no amount of improving a single-community dashboard would fix it, because the data simply is not in your community. This is the structural blind spot, and it produces two specific mistakes:
- You misread silence as disinterest. It is frequently the opposite: the habit exists, it just was never pointed at you. That is a much easier problem to solve than reviving a dead account.
- You miss where attention is going. If a dozen of your members all spend real time in the same three external rooms, that is a map of what your audience actually cares about, and a shortlist of places where showing up would reach people who already trust you.
Themes: what they care about, not just where they go
Once you can see a member's footprint across Skool, you can say something about what they are into. Skoolgrades synthesizes member themes from that cross-community footprint — the recurring interests visible in what a member engages with around the platform.
This is the difference between "Marcus is quiet" and "Marcus is quiet here, and everything he engages with elsewhere is about paid ads and client acquisition." The second version writes your next DM for you, and it writes your next post too.
How does Skoolgrades work out what my members are doing?
Skoolgrades works it out by reading Skool through your own logged-in browser session, and the collection method matters enough to be precise about.
Skoolgrades runs as a Chrome extension installed by the community owner. It reads through the owner's own logged-in Skool session, in the owner's own browser. As of July 2026 there is no public Skool API — Skool ships changes often, so check its own documentation — and there is no partnership and no datacenter scraping. To Skool it looks like an admin browsing their own community, because that is exactly what it is. Skoolgrades is not affiliated with or endorsed by Skool.
Eleven streams are collected: the member roster, posts, comments and engagement, the DM channel list, notifications, member profile enrichment, cross-community activity, peer data, leaderboards and analytics. Scheduled jobs then build activity heatmaps, synthesize themes, and materialize 26 cohorts that rebuild weekly.
On privacy, plainly
This only ever reads what is already publicly visible — public Skool profiles, public communities, and your own community that you already administer. It does not read your members' direct messages. It does not see anything hidden or private.
Chat collection is list-only: the DM thread list and unread state, so you know which conversations are waiting on you. There is no DM history backfill, and there never was.
The framing that keeps this healthy is simple. You are not surveilling anyone. You are noticing them — which is the thing every member says they want from a community owner and almost never gets, because past a couple of hundred members no human can hold it all in their head.
What do I get instead of another chart?
Instead of another chart, Skoolgrades hands you every member sorted into a lifecycle state via the Cohort Blender: star, rising, steady, fading, drifted, ghosted, untapped, or going dark. Each state implies a different move.
Two are worth calling out:
- Fading — someone whose own rhythm has broken. Worth a personal message now, while they still remember why they joined.
- Untapped — defined concretely as 25 or more posts elsewhere on Skool, active in two or more communities, seen in the last 14 days, joined 30 or more days ago, and silent with you for 30 or more days.
When a move is a message, you build the list, Skoolgrades drafts it — either verbatim to everyone or personalized per member using what it knows about them — you review and approve every single draft, and you send from the extension panel one click at a time. Nothing goes out on its own. That is a design decision, not a limitation: blast sending is how owners get flagged and how members learn to ignore their inbox.
What are the limits I should know about before trusting these numbers?
Two limits are worth knowing before you trust the numbers: cross-community counts undercount on purpose, and very large communities are sampled rather than fully counted.
Cross-community counts undercount deliberately. "Fourteen of your members are active elsewhere" is a floor, not a total. The real number is higher. Conservative and reliable beats generous and wrong.
Communities over about 3,000 active members are sampled. Those read through a roughly 900-member frame rather than a full census, so the figures are estimates. Directionally useful, not exact, and presented as such.
So what should I take away from all of this?
The takeaway is that most of your members are reading and not posting, and that is fine. A minority have broken their own rhythm, and those are the ones worth your Tuesday morning. And a slice of your roster is genuinely active on Skool while looking dead to you — those are the most winnable people you have, and you cannot find them from inside your own community.
Next: what other communities your members are in, or how to tell if a member is still active.