When it comes to the setup of your pop-community, the ideal people to have on board are your customers. If you already have access to your customers’ information, you can simply upload their emails and names to your Insight Hub community and send an invite for them to join. Alternatively, sample providers are an excellent solution for reaching new audiences and these can be a quick way of adding members to your online space.
It is vital to consider what sort of tasks and activities you will want participants to engage in, as well as how you will motivate participation. In this video, Charlotte makes recommendations on the setup process – and how to make your pop-up community a thriving hub of qualitative insight.
This is the second of a two part series. In the first video, Charlotte spoke provided a brief overview and definition of what comprises a pop-up community, where the research method is commonly used, and the benefits that it can provide.
While there are many tools that you could consider for your pop-up community, we recommend a balance of both quantitative and qualitative tools. This will provide you with the flexibility to test ideas as well as understand your customers’ thoughts about them. For me, forums discussions, polls, surveys and blogs are effective tools for community based activities as they are easy for your customers to interact with.
These activities can be easily promoted in a newsletter format or a quick email invite with direct links for your customers to take part. One of the great things about this is that you can also send invite reminders to those that might not have spotted your original invite and you can continue to prompt participation.
To make your pop-up community a success, it’s vitally important to connect and engage with your participants. By showing them you are present and that they are not speaking to a brick wall, you will help to foster community habits, such as unprompted log-ins and frequent participation. For example, one way that you can do this is if a customer shares an insightful comment, acknowledge their contribution and encourage them to share more details about their feedback.
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.