There are always two aspects to building a successful community engagement strategy. The first is to provide activities and opportunities for expression that encourage natural debate or conversation. However, it is equally important to consider how members will be rewarded for the time that they invest in research activities.

Incentive Design

Different members may be motivated by different means. In this video, Charlotte Evans highlights a number of the common ways that community incentives can influence member engagement. The video touches on direct incentives, prize draws, the design of conditions and the importance of feeding back results.

One way you can motivate your members is by offering incentives for completing activities that require greater time commitments from them to complete. These incentives can range from shopping vouchers to virtual points and allow you to show members that you are thankful for their involvement. It can be particularly beneficial to add these to activities such as Question Boards and diary studies as this will improve completion rates and the quality of responses shared.

The next way to motivate your members is to offer an exclusive reward which can be won by a very small number of members. For example, when you release a new forum discussion, rewards can be added to the discussion to encourage high quality responses to be shared. This can include choosing one best contributor to win a shopping voucher or a virtual badge for the best suggestion.

A final piece of advice shared in this video is to give back to your community members by sharing the results and findings from recent community activities. If you’ve created a new product or have an interesting statistic to reveal to your members: infographics, videos and homepage summaries are a fun and visual way to share these with your members. By sharing results, you demonstrate that you value and listen to your members and this will encourage them to continue to share their feedback with you.

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.