Keeping your community members engaged is one sure fire way to ensure you have participants interested and keen to take part in your research activities. By building an engagement strategy, you will begin to reap the benefits, such as higher response rates and a greater depth to the conversations members engage in. 

Variety and Motivation

Understanding who your community members are and what motivates them, in addition to putting in place activities that center around them rather than research are both key steps in building an engaged community.

In this first of a two-part mini-series, Charlotte highlights a number of the tactics that can be used to facilitate and build this level of engagement.

When it comes to choosing activities to add to your engagement strategy, mix up the types you include in your schedule. This will reduce the repetition of activities shared with your members and keep members interested in seeing your new activities. Tasks such as Smartboards and Scrapbooks offer an interactive and fun interface where your members can have fun getting creative by adding sticky notes to smartboard images and uploading images of their own to scrapbooks. By providing a space for members to share their ideas, members will feel a sense of involvement and be encouraged to keep sharing feedback with your brand!

Understanding who your community members are can also shape your engagement strategy and the content that you share with your members. If your members are interested in specific topics, such as fashion and sports, you can tailor the themes of your activities to appeal to their interests.

For example, for those interested in fashion, you can create discussions about the latest trends shared by their favourite brands or play into lifestyle ambitions. For members interested in sports, you could include polls on predictions of which football team will win the upcoming league. This type of content is great for increasing interactions amongst members and boosting their interest in future activities.

Online Research Hints & Tips

The Online Research Hints and Tips series is designed to provide quick, easy-to-digest and actionable advice to help you make the most out of online qualitative and quantitative efforts. Tackling topics that range from participant communication to database management, getting the most out of focus groups to engagement strategies - we're aiming to make the world of online research easier for everyone to understand.