Tips and Strategies for longitudinal Customer Closeness and Continuous Discovery Research communities
One thing we’re certain of at Indeemo is that, given the accelerating rate of change, it is increasingly critical for brands to create a culture of Continuous Discovery and implement longitudinal research programs that get them closer to their customers / users.
Having a panel of research participants available over a sustained period of time allows you to quickly assign tasks / ask questions as they arise and be more agile in your research.
This is one of the reasons why a number of our clients are referring to Digital Ethnography as an alternative to Market Research Online Communities (MROCs). If you missed our previous blog on how our clients use Digital Ethnography as an alternative to Market Research Online Communities, it is worth a quick read.
Regardless of what you call it, our clients are increasingly recruiting participants into a “research community” on Indeemo so they can conduct ongoing, agile research over a period of months and build a deeper understanding of their target audience.
This post shares some advice on how you can leverage Digital Ethnography for long term, continuous research programs (or “communities”) that achieve the following goals:
Transform your research with context rich, in-the-moment multimedia insights
Build customer closeness into the heart of your research investment
Build a deeper connection with your target audience
Be agile and iterative with your research
Build a framework for continuous discovery and learning with your customer at the heart of it.
If you are curious about migrating away from research communities and using Digital Ethnography for longitudinal, continuous discovery and customer closeness, here are some tips that we hope will be useful.
How do I recruit respondents for Digital Ethnography online research Research community?
Great research starts with great recruitment. The benefit of using longitudinal Digital Ethnography as an alternative to MROCs means the ROI on your recruitment spend is multiplied significantly. The cost to recruit for a 1 week study or a 3 month “community” will typically be the same. This gives you much more bang for your buck, especially when research budgets are under pressure.
Typically recruitment for using Digital Ethnography as an alternative to MROCs can be done in a number of ways.
Use a Qualitative Recruitment / Fieldwork Agency
This is how most of our customers recruit research respondents for Indeemo projects. Typically you provide your Qual Recruiter with a screener specifying your target customer personas / consumer segments and the recruiter will either tap into their own panel or go and source research participants for you.
Depending on the incident rate of your target respondent, the cost to recruit starts at US$100-200 per respondent (in the US) for consumers, $200-500 for harder to reach B2B respondents and will be much higher for Healthcare scenarios where rare disease patients could be the target.
Tap into your CRM or User List
Increasingly for our UX / CX focused clients, they want to engage actual users or customers and hence will tap into their CRM as a source of Respondents.
There are a number of advantages and disadvantages to this approach.
The advantages are that you know that the respondent is genuinely interested / connected with the research and hence the value of what they share can be higher. They can also be “free” to recruit.
The pros and cons of going via a recruiter or using your own customers
However, your customers will typically be first time research participants and hence may not be familiar with doing research. This means that they might not understand the level of input that you require which requires a bit more respondent management and follow up. As they are your customer, you might find yourself “walking on eggshells” as you don’t want to push them as hard as you would recruited participants who are not actually your customers.
The simple work around here is to retain a recruitment agency and give them your user list so that they can be the “neutral party” or, if you have the resources internally, get your Research Ops team to handle the recruitment and participant management for you.
How many Respondents should I recruit for an online research community?
Again this varies depending on the topic but you should factor in the following:
How many customer personas / consumer segments do you need to recruit?
How long is the study
What it the total number of participants I can comfortably engage and manage
Typically we recommend that you have 8-12 participants per persona / segment. However, this should fluctuate based on a number of considerations.
For example, if you only have 2 groups, then 16 will be too few as you need to factor in some element of churn given the longitudinal nature of the project. So in this scenario, 24 would be a better number as it allows for some churn but also gives you a minimum cohort of 20 over all.
If you have 4 groups to engage, then we recommend you go with no less than 8 / group. This gives you a total of 32 and even if some churn, you will still have a group of 20-25+ which will give you a good critical mass of insight to analyse.
As the data captured will be a mixture of video, imagery, screen recordings and text, the data will be much richer and more insightful than typical online MROCs and hence your total number overall can be lower.
If you have more than 4 groups, then you can probably reduce the number per cohort. Typically our clients tell us that once you go beyond 30 respondents, the incremental learnings reduce and the extra analysis needed does not yield meaningful returns on the time invested.
Long story short, somewhere in the region of 25-50 is the sweet spot.
What incentive should I pay my online research community participants?
Again this varies massively depending on whether you are consumer, B2B or healthcare. There is no hard and fast rule of thumb here.
However, there are some tips to consider: unlike a 1-2 week study where Respondents are actively engaged daily, in a research community project the duration is much longer and hence the level of engagement per week is much lighter. This way, the incentive you might have to pay for an intensive 2 week study will actually go a long way in a more longitudinal community style project.
The calculus is simple: figure out how many minutes / week or hours / month your participant will genuinely need to invest and then work out the $ / £ / € equivalent of this time. Depending on the cadence of your tasking, we would expect that respondents would be active no more than 1 hour / week. If you think of this, it would be 3 x 20 minute sessions a week and in reality, completing activities such as posting photos / screenshots might be less time.
Finally, we recommend you pay the inventive in tranches with the largest tranche at the end. This was respondents stay active as they are regularly getting paid e.g. one / month and by keeping a larger chunk for the end, they are incentivised to go the full duration.
In a 3 month community, we recommend you pay 25% at the end of months 1 and 2 and then leave 50% for any respondents who complete the full 3 months.
Finally, because the duration of the study is longer, the total incentive you will pay will be a multiple of what they might earn in a typical 1-2 week study. In this sense, the overall incentive will be a meaningful amount and will grab and hold their attention.
If you’d like to learn more about recruitment for online research projects, check out online research recruitment guide.
What is the ideal duration for an online research community?
So how long should your “community” last for? This can vary. We have one client who has been using Digital Ethnography as a research community solution for over 4 years now. This is obviously an outlier but speaks to the potential of this approach to truly build a lasting connection with your target audience.
Other studies may last for up to 1 month but for us, the sweet spot is in the region of 3 months.
This gives you enough time to maintain a meaningful connection with the research participants without them becoming jaded and churining from your community. Our clients also tell us that there is a law of diminishing marginal returns that kicks in once you go beyond 3 months.
The respondents become attuned to your research and the surprises / new learning factor wanes. Refreshing the community after 3 months allows you to maximise your learnings while keeping the respondents meaningfully engaged without the whole experience becoming tired on both ends.
What tasking strategy should I use for an online community?
On Indeemo, we offer 3 types of tasking:
All-at-once
Sequential
Scheduled
For digital ethnography research communities, we always recommend scheduled tasking. With this approach you can program the start and end time of every task and activity. This gives you the ability to vary activities, tasks and topics over time and control how many activities or tasks respondents see at any one time.
Here are some of our recommendations when to comes to scheduled tasking:
Get to know each other in the first week
The first week or 2 is all about establishing rapport and trust. We always recommend you record an intro selfie video and insert that into the introduction of your task list.
Tell them who you are. Talk about the purpose of the project. Be transparent about what you expect from them, what they need to do and when and most importantly, when will they get paid.
Also task them to introduce themselves to you and assign a number of fun, light, icebreaker tasks that get them used to the approach but also help you get to know them personally.
Establish a research cadence for tasking
Scheduled tasking allows you to switch off the week 1 tasks and replace them with fresh tasks on week 2 for example. It also allows you to establish a cadence of tasking.
So, once the first few days / week is over, you can get into the rhythm of your research. Some of our clients assign tasks weekly, others biweekly. It depends.
A task can be kept open for as long as you wish on Indeemo. This allows the respondents to “spend more time” with each task and reply over the course of the task duration. With scheduled tasking, they will get a push notification when the task goes live. This is a great mechanic to keep them engage and, because of this, even if you want them to complete a single task called “Activity A” which lasts for 4 weeks, we recommend you set up 4 x 1 week tasks and call them “Activity A - week 1”, “Activity A - week 2” etc. This is more engaging for the respondents and also allows you to analyse the tasks week by week on the dashboard.
Alternate the intensity of tasking
One final tip would be to alternate the density of tasks. Sometimes it’s good to have a “light week” where respondents do not have too much work to do and alternate these light weeks with more intensive weeks where they may have several tasks to complete.
This can alternate in 1 week / 2 week cycles or 2 week / 4 week cycles depending on your requirements and the frequency at which the topics of interest occur in the everyday lives of respondents.
Regardless of the cycle, we strongly recommend repeatable cycles so the respondents build up muscle memory and know that every 2nd or 4th week will be light or intensive for example.
Always have a general feedback task open
Even if you adopt the cadence / alternation strategies shown above, we recommend that you always have a “General feedback” or “Daily diary” task open that gives the respondents the chance to share random stuff with you.
This could be a new trend or something that they think of that does not specifically relate to the tasks you assign but might be wonderfully insightful. In every project you will have a subset of super respondents who will go the extra mile and really engage with your project.
By having one task that is always on, it gives respondents a ‘place’ to continuously share feedback or trends with you and it is via this means that you give them the freedom to go off-piste and surprise you.
Consider using Digital Ethnography as part of mixed method research approach
One final point to consider, especially with respect to establishing a cadence and maximising engagement is to blend in IDIs with the longitudinal research. This ability to “meet” the Respondents synchronously as well as continuously stay connected with them asynchronously both establishes a cadence and maximises engagement and completion rates.
Coinciding the monthly IDI - even if it only lasts for 30 minutes - with the payment of incentives is also a great mechanic. Not only does it keep them active and maintain rapport it sets a concrete milestone for them to work towards / achieve.
Refresh and repeat
Finally, as mentioned earlier, the sweet spot duration is in the 2-3 month range. In order to keep the learnings fresh and always have engaged respondents, our clients regularly terminate communities and start again with a new cohort of respondents.
If your community is 3 months in duration, a realistic number of communities to run each year might be 3 x 3 month research communities.
This gives you a chance to reflect at the end of each community and learn from the entire body of data captured and insights surfaced. It gives you time to reflect and figure out what worked well and what did not.
This feeds into the agile nature of this approach and makes it extremely suitable for iterative research. It is also a realistic cadence that gives your team time to process the learning and insights and agree what the objectives are for the next community. Furthermore, there will be times in each year where either you or your participants might be “busy” e.g. summer vacation, the Holiday Season / Christmas etc.
Taking a break during these times is a sensible and sustainable way to do continuous research that keeps you constantly connected with your customers.
Let us support your next research community
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If the above approach resonates with your research objectives, please get in touch and we can set up a call with one of our Strategists to discuss your own specific requirements.
Indeemo is available as a self service platform under annual licence. By combining our strategic advice with a self service SaaS platform, we give you the ability to benefit from our expertise while being completely autonomous and agile.
As the rate of change continues to increase, the need to stay both constantly connected with your users and customers AND be able to assign tasks / activities / questions at speed is paramount. Indeemo allows you to achieve both of these objectives in a way that is intuitive and personal enabling you to truly build a deeper connection with your target audience and their ever changing needs.
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