Here are 5 ways to think about the success of an online research community:

1. Progress & Level of Understanding

Did the research community deliver on the objectives you were trying to achieve? What did you learn about your customers? What did your customers share over the life of the community and would this have been possible without the community venue?

2. Replacement or Supplement

Were you able to effectively use the community venue to supplement, refine, or replace some of your non-community research needs over time? How much cost savings did you realize as a result?

3. Internal Stakeholder Satisfaction

How do your internal teams and stakeholders feel about the output from your community research? Did it give them access to insights and ideas to help them be more effective -  compared to the other types of research?  Did having this ongoing venue make you more efficient and speed up product/research cycles internally?

4. Cost/Benefit

Thinking about the output from your community, could you have found this information through another research method? If you were to try to get the information somewhere else, how much time and money would it have required?

5. Affinity & Loyalty

How do your customers feel as a result of participating in this research? Do they feel differently about your brand and the direction of your organization? What are some ways you can use community tools with a wider group of customers in the future?

For a lot of us in the online community space, we are oftentimes judged by the number of “active members” in our communities. Whether this is initial signups, unique visits in the last 3 months, unique monthly visits, or number of page views… How active does “active” need to be?

The good news is that it might not really matter. I don’t think this is the best way to judge the value of an online research community. To me, it is more about the quality of contributions, relationships and connections that are made, and ultimately how insightful the research community is for a client. Some of our greatest research communities have been with 40-50 passionate people. For these clients, it was more about developing a holistic understanding of these select people and what their lives were like. It wasn’t a mad dash for completes.

When they bury me in the special graveyard reserved for the qualitative research community elite (please read with appropriate sarcasm) - I’d rather be judged by the value of the research and the quality of the decisions a client makes, than the number of people that responded to a poll or discussion.

I must point out that we have the luxury of being in the qualitative realm, so the same rules do not apply for panel/portals or larger marketing communities, but I wish people would worry less about the number of people and more about what people are saying. By the way, I’m not suggesting to neglect metrics or that research communities of 10 people are supremely insightful, only that it’s not just the size that matters…