On 16th December 2021, Insight Platforms published an article written by FlexMR’s Copywriter, Emily James, entitled How Top Insight Communities Engage Members. In this new article, Emily discusses ways in which insight teams create successful insight communities with engaged, responsive research participants.
Insight communities are platforms that can facilitate high-quality insight generation, allowing stakeholder organisations to connect directly to customers and their target market at the click of a button – but only when the members are properly engaged in the research experience. This is a topic that crops up time and again in research circles, mainly because each participant and group of participants find different things interesting, so it’s hard to engage everyone at the same time using only one or two methods.
How Top Insight Communities Engage Members
So how do insight teams engage community members to make sure they obtain lots of accurate and relevant data? Emily poses seven tactics that work to keep participants interested and engaged in the research experience:
- Vary research tasks – monotony is the death of interest, so why does it persist in the research industry? The best way to make sure participants are engaged is to mix it up, make sure there are different tasks to complete rather repetitively typing out the same responses time and again.
- Clear and concise wording – clarity is the key to better understanding. If participants don’t understand what they need to do or what the question is asking then they’ll either skip it entirely or put down something that might not be relevant to the research at all.
- Signpost everything – make it as easy as possible for participants to find research tasks on the platform their using. Without signposts or communications pointing the way, they won’t find all of the research tasks they need to complete and the data insight teams get will be incomplete and potentially very biased.
- Communicate outside of research schedules – consistent communication outside of scheduled research tasks will help perpetuate their interest in the research and might lead to more unexpected insight generation opportunities.
- Gamify research experiences – there’s a reason why games (whether video or otherwise) continue to be one of the most successful products in the world when created well. Good games capture our attention and keep it until the game is finished, and there are some principles we can transfer to our research to the same end.
- Secure data communication and storage channels – most of the data participants share will be personal data, with a good number of brands and participants able to identify others by combinations of the data they provide. So making sure that the channels they share that data in are secure is essential if participants are to feel safe enough to share it.
- Don’t forget about incentives – incentives are a time-honoured research tradition for a reason. There will always be those people who don’t want to participate or share their data without financial compensation or at least the chance for a financial reward, so incentives are there to capture that initial attention and drive people to at least provide the minimum amount of data needed to gain that incentive.
While each of these on their own might boost engagement in insight communities on their own, they will work best when mixed in together in a single engagement strategy. Want to read more? Then take a look at the full article on Insight Platforms now.
About Insight Platforms
Insight Platforms is the leading online resource for learning about digital research tools. The company has their own directory of over 700 market research suppliers in over 30 categories from A/B Testing to Visual Analytics; and also boasts a myriad of blogs, guides, independent reviews from experts in product research, consumer insights, social intelligence, customer experience and digital analytics.
