Let's imagine you've decided that a Market Research Online Community (MROC) is a good fit for your organization...  You've read all about the benefits of a MROC, developed your objectives and metrics for success, selected a MROC vendor and are ready to get started.  What's next? 

Most companies can (fairly) easily digest the findings from a set of focus groups...  However, MROCs are a bit different, as they present a steady stream of customer insights that may have far reaching implications for your company.  The issue then becomes:

• How do you explain this new research resource to your internal stakeholders?  
• How do you level set expectations for appropriate content/topics to explore in your MROC?
• How do you effectively distribute the findings across your organization?

How do you explain this new research resource to your internal stakeholders?

To borrow a bit from Chip and Dan Heath (authors of Made to Stick), it helps to put your MROC in light of an existing "schema."  For example, you may want to talk about how a MROC is like an ongoing focus group with a larger sample size than normal.  We touched on this before in our post on "A Focus Group on Steroids."  That will help set the expectation early on that a MROC is primarily a qualitative tool. 

Also consider showing them a sample deliverable from a community, to help stakeholders understand exactly what they can expect from the output.  Finally, a mock-up and guided tour of the pre-launch site (with a bit of "seed" content for reference) will help sets the stage for what is to come.  Most (or all) of this can be accomplished in a single afternoon meeting...

How do you level set expectations for appropriate content/topics to explore in your MROC?

You'll want to quickly outline what is appropriate and not appropriate to explore in a MROC.  Typically, MROCs are qualitative in nature, meaning anything that you would normally cover through a survey should probably be left to a survey.  That's not to say that surveys cannot (or should not) be run in a MROC; rather, it is important to caveat the output to ensure decisions are made with the appropriate data.

In general, a simple document explaining how to use the community with some specific examples of "ideal" community questions will help set expectations properly early on.  We like to seed the facilitation plan with examples of relevant activities to help get people thinking about how to use their MROC.  Again, this is something that can be accomplished over the course of a kickoff meeting.

How do you effectively distribute the findings across your organization?

Last, but definitely not least, is how you plan to distribute findings.  Unlike focus groups and other "point in time" qualitative research methods, the findings from a MROC are continuous.  Left unattended, they can accumulate into very large reports that get lost on a company's intranet.  The key is to deliver findings in "bite size" pieces in the form which your stakeholders are most likely to pay attention. 

For example, if your company's culture is driven by email communication (as most are) then you have a variety of options at your disposal.  These options might be in the form of a monthly email announcing the report (and providing a link to download directly from the email), weekly emails with topline findings and highlights of activities to come or even "twitter-like" bursts of insights throughout the week/month to keep people intrigued by what is happening in the community. 

If your company is a bit more "hip" to technology and social media, then you could experiment with various means of distributing findings via those channels (more on that in future blog posts...).

The takeaway...

You'll have to do a bit of prep work to get your company ready for a MROC, but it will be well worth it in the form of happy stakeholders who are more knowledgeable about your target audience than ever before...  

- Matt 

A great read

Ever since I read “Made to Stick” by Chip Heath and Dan Heath last year, I’ve been interested in ways to make our monthly research community reports to clients more “sticky.” One of the biggest challenges with running an online research community (as well as other types of qualitative market research) is that you can receive so much feedback over time that it’s difficult to distill it down into meaningful findings in such a way that your stakeholders will pay attention.

Here is a quick tip for how to make your online research community findings “stick.”

Making your research community findings more “Concrete”

In their (great) book, Chip and Dan describe one of the elements in their SUCCESs acronym as making your ideas more “Concrete.” To the authors, this means providing real examples with concrete details, rather than using abstractions to illustrate your point.

First, let me provide some background for the tip… In the first few months of running an online research community, we typically spend a lot of time getting to know the audience. This phase of understanding the audience helps set the context for responses to future research activities. The deliverable from these initial “understanding” exercises is a comprehensive set of personas made up of demographic and psychographic data collected during the initial screening, as well as responses made to ongoing research activities.

We’ve found that the way to make these personas “stick” is to make them as “concrete” as possible. Instead of relating a generality like “many members like to read in their spare time,” we might write about how “when they’re not reading Moby Dick, they’re pouring through the latest pages of US Weekly.” (OK - really bad example, but bear with me :) Of course, we’re not fabricating this info for entertainment value. The “concrete” description always derives from somewhere in the research community. However, it’s this level of detail that makes these personas seem “real” (and therefore a bit more “sticky”).

Try this when you’re prepping your next research report (or any report for that matter). Bonus points if you add some entertainment value to it!

What do you think?

Have you tried to make your research findings more “sticky” (either as a client or vendor-side researcher)? What works for you? More importantly, what doesn’t work?

Wait, there’s more!

I’ll be sure to follow-up with a few more tips, as there are many ways we’ve tried to make our research community report findings more “sticky.” There are other aspects of the SUCCESs acronym that have implications for how to present the findings from an online research community, so I’ll share them in the weeks to come.