How do I keep my Insight Community Members engaged?

Understand Member motivations

Consider your potential Member personas when designing your engagement approach – are they likely motivated by social elements and interested in discussing passion points and socialising or more individual activities such as surveys which allow feedback in a private and structured way? Establish your rewards approach at set-up based on what you anticipate Member motivations to be, then validate these through Member feedback and behavioural data, to continuously improve.

Set expectations

Start as you mean to go on. Onboarding is about more than just profiling your Community Members, it’s about making sure they know what to expect from their experience, outlining what’s in it for them and highlighting the value of their participation. Explain to them why the Community exists and how their contributions will be used overall, and for each task you’re inviting them to participate in. Our research with Gen Z showed that influencing a brand’s decision-making can be an important motivator – it’s important to feed back on this too (see ‘Feedback, feedback, feedback’ below).

Encourage purposeful engagement

Activity breeds activity. If your Community feels static, or empty, or if the first things Members see when they log in are old conversations or out-of-date news, they will not be motivated to contribute as much or as deeply as you need. Live moderation of topics i.e. responding in real time to Member comments, is likely to result in more effective probing and follow up. Similarly, directing Members to fresh and active parts of the Community nudges them to other activities rather than them closing the window at the end of a survey. Think about non-research related tasks that tie into fun and topical events. But beware – too much low value activity can actually weaken engagement. Avoid filling the calendar with seasonal prompts simply to generate activity: if the topic feels irrelevant, Members may go off-topic or question its purpose.  Engagement activity should be purposeful and bespoke to your Member motivations; for example, in a financial services Community, Members may prefer to discuss the detail of a new service or how clearly a product is explained, rather than join in general chit-chat. In a TV Community, lighter conversations about viewing routines or how a channel fits into Members’ leisure time may feel more natural.

Time activities around moments that matter to both your brand and your Members, such as asking customers what worked and what frustrated them after trying a new product or service.

And finally; don’t sidestep an issue Members want to discuss, such as a frustrating service experience; give it a clear space rather than expecting unrelated activities to distract them.

Create a community, with a small ‘c’

While Insight Communities are platforms built for research, they are also built for their Members.

Within the boundaries of what’s acceptable, allow your Community Members to talk freely and add topics outside the scope of your research. This will help Members to become more comfortable in the environment, reinforce that this is a space to voice their opinion and has the added benefit that you may discover issues and topics that matter to Members without needing to prompt them.

Feedback, feedback, feedback

One of the most important aspects of running an Insight Community is ensuring that its Members feel appreciated, meaning that their contributions have been heard and have made a difference. Doing so in a timely manner is key as Members will want to know what happened to the opinions they’ve given. You need to regularly feed back through newsletters, Member spotlights, behind-the-scenes content and of course by highlighting the impact of the research.

Make space for every voice

While your ultimate goal is to have Community Members that are highly engaged, it will always be true that some will be much more engaged than others. They say ‘the squeaky wheel gets the grease’ but the potential issue with more vocal Community Members is that they may put others off with their strong opinions. Recognise enthusiastic Members whilst ensuring they don’t dominate and ensure you create tasks and activities which allow quieter voices to be heard, or which create space for individual feedback. For example, we can create ‘private’ discussions where Members can share thoughts without those being seen or commented upon by others, or we can pose quick poll questions which appeal to time-poor Members or those who prefer surveys to discussions.

Get personal

Insight Communities are often run by researchers/insight professionals who are always taught to be distant and objective with their findings. Sometimes this can spill over to how they run the Community, which risks them becoming a faceless entity to your Members. Whoever is managing your Community should try sharing personal experiences, adding to the discussion forums and bringing out a more human element if they want to engage Members and win their trust.

Moderate proactively and reactively

All open discussions in an Insight Community need moderation. The moderator’s job is to make sure that Members keep to the rules and standards of behaviour you’ve established for the Community.

These standards will vary somewhat by Community. Bad behaviour tends to be quite rare in an Insight Community (as people know that ultimately, they’ll lose their incentives if they get banned). But basic etiquette is still required – no personal abuse, no bigoted language, no harassment, and in most cases no profanity.

It’s also common to ban off-topic conversations (i.e. discussions which veer off-course and get onto unrelated topics). A little off-topic conversation is harmless and can help build Community bonds – sometimes you might even encourage it, like asking for pet photos as an engagement-building task. Other subjects, like politics, sex and religion, are best avoided entirely unless there’s a strong link to the overall Community topic.

Moderation in a Community needs to be both proactive and reactive. Proactive moderation is about following conversations, setting a tone in starting them, and stepping in when needed to enforce rules and standards. Proactive moderation needs to be light touch – the Community Members should feel the moderators are part of the Community rather than an external police force.

Reactive moderation is when a problem or breach is reported by a Member. The key here is speed of response and consistency – the quicker you react to an issue and resolve it, the more trust Members will have in your ability to step in in future.

As we say, most of the time behaviour in Insight Communities is good, or at least when compared to the wider online world!

Monitor Community health and intelligence

So far we’ve looked mostly at what the Community Manage can do to keep individual Members engaged. But what about the overall health of the Community? How active is it? How many Members is it gaining or losing? How many Members are taking part in tasks?

These metrics aren’t always obvious from looking at individual activity. For instance, Members might respond quickly to some kinds of tasks but slowly to others. Or an apparently busy Community might conceal a high churn rate, which makes it more expensive to run.

The best way to deal with Community health is regular reporting, which lets you establish trendlines and spot problems early. For a long-term Community, monthly data pulls are usually enough, and on a good platform the reporting can be easily automated.

The kind of metrics you should be looking at include:

• Top-up: how many new Members are you replacing? Look closely at the onboarding and recruitment process where many new Members don’t become active and engaged.
• Activity: How often are Members logging into the Community? How often are they contributing? What is the task completion rate? These all let you detect engagement trends and offer warning signs of low engagement. You should also look at how these vary across tasks and (where applicable) segments – are some segments less engaged than others?
• Expulsion: how many Members are you losing due to leaving, prolonged inactivity, or rule-breaking? A rise in this may mean a problem with engagement or moderation.
• Satisfaction: Finally, one of the best ways to measure Community health is to ask the Community! Regular satisfaction surveys not only tell you how Members are feeling, they tell Members you care about that.

Your team and their engagement strategy makes a huge difference in the ROI and effectiveness of your Insight Community. It’s also important to get rewards right, so in the next section we’ll take a closer look at those.