Reimagining Insight Communities: 3 Strategies to Maximize Engagement and Research ROI

When it comes to delivering flexibility, scale and speed, insight communities remain super useful for many research teams today. Despite all the sexier, flashier trends we’ve seen in our industry over years, this approach remains one of the most reliable ways of engaging customers and getting ongoing, high-quality data. 

But just like any methodology or technology, we can’t rely on outdated approaches and expect to see great results. The fundamental idea behind communities remains largely the same: it’s about getting the right people to agree to participate in research so you have a pre-profiled group of consumers to engage when you need feedback. Your approaches surrounding that core strategy, however, need to evolve to get the most out of this tool.

The key to making insight communities work is to align your engagement strategy with the expectations and behaviors of modern consumers. In this article, I’d like to offer strategies that cover three major aspects of community-based research: recruitment, engagement and distribution.

Recruitment: Embrace an ongoing, multi-channel approach

The importance of recruitment cannot be overstated. You need to engage the right people to capture insights you can trust and rely on. Recruitment is the first step to doing that.

From our experience, a multi-channel approach works best. The reason is simple: Different channels offer different benefits and drawbacks.

Sample providers typically deliver cost-efficiency and speed, for example, but it’s not uncommon to attract “professional survey takers” with this approach. There are great community members to be found here, but there is also going to be some churn when people who only care about incentives fall off (and they fall off quickly). If sample providers are how you plan on building your community, then think of over-recruiting by about 30% of your target community size right from the beginning.

On the other hand, social sampling and other next-gen recruitment tactics are typically slower to build momentum, but they can be very effective in building Gen Z insight communities or when doing work with hard-to-reach groups. Your own database and CRM, as well as intercepts (QR codes, website popups, etc.) are also viable options.

The right mix of channels, of course, depends on your business and research needs. But more crucially, it depends on your audience. It’s important to use tech that works well with these channels and to collaborate with partners who have the experience and expertise to help you execute.

Engagement: Be consistent, and be participant-first

The ROI of your insight community should increase the longer you have it. In fact, with the right approach, you should see faster and higher quality data over time.

A real-world example might help illustrate my point here. A snacking brand that uses our platform sees an average of 74% response rates from their community—a number that goes up to 94% if you include only active members. While this company is an outlier (a research-on-research we conducted in 2023 shows that the average active member response rate for communities running on our mobile-first platform hovers at around 55%), we can all learn from their approach.

For this brand, consistency is key. They engage their community members a couple of times a month, and they make sure that their surveys are fun and conversational. The company conducts a wide range of research methodologies—everything from concept testing to IHUTs and message testing. Regardless of the methodology, the participant experience is prioritized.

This brand’s consistency is paying off in surprising ways. For one, members have developed expertise on the topics that the company engages them in. By talking to their community about all things snacks, members gain more familiarity and context. As a result, provide more thoughtful and more detailed feedback over time.

The community has also become a source of pride for members, many of whom regularly brag about their participation with this brand on social media.

Distribution: Personalize and be timely

The real power of communities lies in their ability to connect you with the right people at the right time with the right activities. Personalization is key.

To be able to personalize, you need to have the right data about your members in your system. But rather than asking a big batch of demo questions in your recruitment survey, what we usually advocate for is a more thoughtful approach of building people’s profiles over time. The best insight community tools in the market will allow you to collect profile data on an ongoing basis and use that to personalize future engagements.

Personalization also applies to timing. If your platform allows you to send activities based on your members’ time zones, you should absolutely take advantage of that feature.

Building your members’ profiles can reduce research costs, accelerate speed to insights, and increase your output and productivity. A beverage company that recently switched from a traditional vendor to our platform, for example, utilizes profile variables to personalize their surveys.

This allows them to be specific on who they talk to. It’s also allowed them to reduce survey length (the average LOI for communities on the Rival platform is 4.5 minutes), since they don’t have to ask for information they already have. More crucially, this approach lets them do more research because they don’t have to worry about overburdening their members with invites that do not apply to them.

Embracing a mobile-first approach, this company, as well as others like them, typically see a 49%  completion rate within the first 3 hours.

Conclusion

In my 30+ years in the insights industry, I’ve had the opportunity to be a witness to some of the biggest and most impactful market research trends. Some principles remain the same though, and I’ve discussed some of those here. And while these strategies are specifically for insight communities, they are in fact also applicable to other methodologies. If you’re thoughtful in how you bring people in, how you engage them, and how you keep them in conversation, you’ll see a bigger return from your investments in research.