Engaging stakeholders with your Insight Community
To get the most out of your Insight Community you need as much buy-in as possible!
Not just from Community users (people in your organisation who will use the Insight Community to conduct research), but from stakeholders (people in your organisation who have an interest or influence in, or use and act on, Community insights) too.
The longer the Community is intended to run, the more vital wide buy-in becomes.
But buy-in is not a box you can tick. You can’t just announce your Insight Community and then walk away.
For a Community to deliver its potential benefits to a brand, it needs to be a consistent, regular and useful presence within the business. Ongoing visibility is vital. This is a challenge for many Insight Communities – 1 in 3 Insight Community buyers in our annual survey said that engaging internal stakeholders in a Community is challenging.
So how can you address this and ensure their buy in?
In a nutshell, you should:
- Clarify internal processes
- Create a launch plan
- Build long-term engagement
- Celebrate success
Clarify internal processes
Nothing kills internal enthusiasm more quickly than being told about an exciting new business initiative but not being able to access and use it. Before you launch your Insight Community, you need to be absolutely clear about the internal processes around using it. For instance:
- How a stakeholder can commission a project using the Insight Community.
- Who signs off internal projects and the processes for costing them.
- How questions and troubleshooting requests can be raised.
- What to do in the event of a resource bottleneck and how requests will be prioritised.
- Timeframes for all the above.
Create documentation and processes in advance for when a stakeholder wants to use the Community for research. Once this scaffolding is in place, you’ll be in a position to launch to your internal audience.
Create a launch plan
How should you launch the Community? The answer depends on how long you intend to run the Community for, and how much of the business you want to get involved. But a launch of some kind is essential. First impressions matter deeply, and a launch event lets you communicate to as wide an audience as possible and set expectations.
Of course, if you hold a launch event too early, you won’t have produced any insights yet. That’s why we’d recommend planning a launch event after the Community has been live for a short while, therefore giving a chance to share some early insights and Member feedback, creating interest, excitement and appetite for research. Assets like Member ‘day in the life’ videos can bring the Community to life even early on.
Whenever you hold the launch event, you need to be very clear about what it is intended to achieve.
Awareness: At the most basic level, you need stakeholders to know that the Insight Community exists, whether or not they can attend a launch. Any invites (and internal collateral like posters or flyers) should communicate this basic information, with a one-sentence description of the Community and its aim. You also need to ensure the launch is covered in any internal newsletters.
Understanding: You want stakeholders attending the event to understand what the Insight Community is, how it works, why the business is investing in it, and what the aims are. The launch is an opportunity to summarise the need for the Community and the problems it’s going to solve for the business.
Expectations: The launch is also a chance to set expectations. What results from the Insight Community will look like, when they’ll be coming, how they can be used. It’s important to be realistic and not overpromise or undersell the project.
Legitimacy: Finally, one of the most important roles of the launch is to signal to the business that this is an important project worth paying attention to. The more senior speakers and attendees you can get at the launch, the better – it will help give the message that the Insight Community should not be ignored.
Build long-term engagement
The most critical time for internal buy-in is often the weeks and months after launch. It’s in this time period that your Community will either be adored or ignored. The difference comes down to three things: feedback, assistance, and communication.
Feedback loops
If Community stakeholders feel consulted, they will feel more committed – particularly when you are seen to act on their questions or concerns. Proactively seek out feedback on what works and what doesn’t from Community users. Their insight will be extremely valuable in terms of identifying any “pain points” in the experience which need to be tackled.
Briefing documents
Briefing documents are a vital tool. It’s a chance to find out what your users want. They help facilitate a conversation where you can manage expectations. Each Community will have its own briefing document, but they will certainly cover these areas:
- What’s your challenge and what is the background to this?
- Where does this sit within your strategy?
- What business decisions will you make from the research?
- What has led to this research?
- Do you have any hypotheses currently, i.e. what you think is true/untrue?
- What will it be used for, where will it be going after delivery?
- Who is the internal audience?
- Has any other similar research been commissioned recently?
- What are your preferences in terms of deliverables
Communication
Communication is the third key part in engagement. Out of sight is out of mind. You need to regularly remind people that the Insight Community exists and is running projects to the benefit of the business.
This can include:
- Starting a regular mailout giving news about the Community. These are designed to remind people the Community exists, raise its profile and ultimately celebrate its success. Initially it should run links to basic resources and basic how-to guides.
- Including the Insight Community in all existing internal communications, HR and training programs.
- Relevant staff should be made aware of it during their induction into the business.
- Make sure that collaboration tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams have pages and channels dedicated to the Community.
- Formal training in how to use the Community should be available to staff who need it.
- Creating simple “Tips and Tricks” and user prompts for visitors to the Community, which can remind people of easy ways to get more out of the Community and suggest new ways to use it.
Celebrate success
You’ll need to be proactive in taking proper credit for successful projects run using the Community. Summarise what went well on each project you run, even if you only communicate it among a select audience of direct stakeholders.
As well as being proactive in communicating success you should also be generous. It’s said that ‘success has many parents.’
An Insight Community is a collaborative research tool. When you get the chance to celebrate a success, be sure to give credit to people in other teams who played a part (by creating a brief, participating in the project, interpreting the output, or any other way). The aim is always to make your organisation feel the Insight Community is a shared asset, not a silo.
To be properly celebrated, though, success also has to be measured. Raising the profile and image of the Insight Community within the business is important, but you will also be expected to demonstrate its ROI.
About the author
Hannah Sealy is Head of Client Partnerships at STRAT7 Researchbods, where she leads client relationships and commercial strategy, connecting clients with continuous insight and customer understanding through insight communities and always-on research strategies.
