The Crucial Role of Member Research in the Success of Online Communities
Embracing Regular Community Member Research
In its most basic form, a community strategy is a balance of an organization’s goals and its member's (a.k.a customer's) needs. Organizations have methodologies for developing goals and objectives, yet I continue to be surprised at how many organizations are missing research as a core part of their online community development and refinement process. Even for organizations that are supposedly “get it” miss the critical step of community research before a major platform change, feature enhancement or policy shift. In many cases there seems to be a real fear (or at least discomfort) in connecting 1:1 with customers. That fear could be rooted in the inability to have meaningful interaction at scale, the overhead associated with regular contact, or the lack of an evolved organizational culture that encourages this type of interaction.
Any community development (or refinement) initiative *requires* the input and direction of the members.
A note on community research during the COVID-19 pandemic:
Conducting member research is especially critical when communities experience radical shifts in population in order to understand new and evolving member needs, and to improve outcomes and retention over time.
Why Conduct Member Research?
There are valid cases for conducting Member research throughout the lifecycle of the relationship. I will focus the balance of this post on member needs research, which should be conducted when developing a new community strategy, prior to launching a new community program, or in special circumstances when the population of the community undergoes a radical change - this could be during a community merger (via acquisition), or during a major societal event like the one we are currently undergoing during the COVID-19 pandemic. Conducting member needs research as part of the strategy development process brings the voice of customer to the center of the strategy, and helps create a lens through which to focus your community building activities.
There are 5 essential questions to frame your community strategy:
WHO are your customers (current, new & potential)?
WHY are they motivated to build relationships with each other?
2.a How do these motivations change over the membership lifecycle (i.e. trajectory of career development)?WHERE do they want to build relationships with each other?
HOW do they want to build relationships with each other?
WHAT value must you provide as a HOST to strengthen and deepen these relationships over time?
Member research can also help answer more tactical questions like:
What role should you play as host, and what community activities should you facilitate?
What types of content and features should be present in the community?
How much time and attention should you reasonably expect from your members?
Should the community be an “on domain” destination, or should the community presence extend on to other sites, like Facebook?
What host and member roles are necessary to ensure a vibrant, ongoing experience?
What type of culture does the community need to thrive?
What activities are members prepared to participate in that will directly or indirectly benefit the host?
What types of marketing and advertising would members find acceptable?
Techniques for Conducting Member Research
On the surface, the process for conducting member research is relatively straightforward: decide on the appropriate techniques given your budget, recruit subjects, conduct the research and analyze the results.
Recruiting
You can recruit research subjects from:
Your existing community
Your blog
Your corporate web site
Partners
Newsletter mailing lists
Customer conference lists
Independent communities about your product or in your market or topic area
Facebook or Linkedin groups about your product or in your market or topic area
Using social network analysis tools like LittleBird or NodeXL to analyze open networks like Twitter.
One on One Interviews
One on one interviews can be conducted via online conference (Zoom, Uberconference), over the phone, or in-person (obviously not recommended in our current environment). The key ingredients are a customer, an interviewer, a notetaker (or a bot / service for transcription (I can recommend both Uberconference & Descript ) and a simple interview script (a sample can be found below). Interviews can be as short as 30 minutes, and generally should last no more than an hour. In my experience, a minimum of 5-6 interviews will yield useful themes and give good data for strategy direction. If your community will serve many different products, market segments, or customer types a good rule of thumb is to try and do interviews with at least 3 people from each segment. One on one interviews can also be augmented nicely by a follow up online survey to a larger group, in order to drill down further on issues uncovered in the initial round of interviews.
Group Sessions
Another great way to get feedback, and to get a lot of feedback at once is to conduct a group feedback session. This is similar to the one on one interviews, except you are guiding a group of members through the a set of topics. Involving multiple subjects at once increases the complexity of the process, so be sure to have someone skilled at facilitation leading the session to keep the conversation on track (per the script and topics), as well as to ensure that all participants have equal air time to give their opinions and feedback.
Online Surveys
The fastest, and often lowest overhead way to get member feedback is to create a short online survey to send to research participants. Online surveys are really great at getting quick quantitative feedback, and the results (depending on the tool) are fairly easily to analyze and study. A few issues with online surveys are that the quality of the results depends on the quality of the questions, and in particular, thinking through appropriate choices for multiple choice questions, and also creating effect write in questions that will yield helpful qualitative feedback.
We tend to use Typeform, which offers a nice mix of refined user experience, conditional logic, easy analysis. Typeform also allows you to present surveys in multiple formats, including their new conversational interface.
Questions to Ask During Research
As mentioned earlier in the post, there are essentially 5 overarching questions for your community strategy, 4 of which you want to answer as an output of member research:
Why do community members want to build relationships with each other?
What do community members need from each other? Explore what community members might desire from interactions with other community members, and try to understand why they are motivated to sustain this activity over time. Answers could range from knowledge sharing, to providing mentoring, to ongoing professional or personal support.Where do you customers want to build relationships with each other?
This question is particularly important to avoid duplicating community features and value that exist elsewhere. The key insight to uncover in this line of questioning is what unique value you can provide in your hosted community AND which external communities and social media sites you need to participate in in order to create a holistic community presence. Increasingly, mobile presents a unique opportunity to host your customer network in fundamentally new ways.How do members want to build relationships with each other?
What value can community members contribute / exchange? It is important to understand what ways community members are capable of participating, how motivated they are to participate, and what their motivational triggers are. Participation could include sharing domain expertise, offering content samples, answering support questions, or even just participating in casual online conversation.What do community members need from you as the host?
Ask questions that explore member expectations of your organization in the role of host. What are the member expectations around your level of participation, your effort in developing content, in fostering participation and your commitment to hosting the community long-term
You should also ask a series of baseline context questions, as well as exploring each of the four key questions above in a more granular way.
A simple list of survey or interview questions might include:
Name, organization, title, a brief role description
Browser and mobile preferences: Chrome vs Safari, iOS vs Andriod, etc.
What information sources do you rely on (relating to the topic of the community)?
What groups (on/offline) are you a member of (relating to the topic of the community)?
What products / services do you use (relating to the topic of the community)?
What is the biggest challenge you face in your day to day work (assuming this relates to the topic of the community)?
How satisfied are you with the level and type of communication you have with organization x?
Do you currently participate in any of the following social media activities: blogging, discussion forums, facebook, twitter, youtube etc (shape the list based on your market)
What information, insight or content do you want to share with other customers?
What kinds of information would be helpful for other customers to share with you?
If organization x were to offer the following content or features, please rate how useful each would be to you: discussion forums, expert Q&A, tutorials & tips, video previews, customer blogs, etc.
Would you be interested in connecting with other members at local, in-person events?
Exploring usability issues around current experiences and apps
In Summary:
I’ve seen investment in member research pay off consistently, just as I’ve seen the severe cost of not conducting member research hamper or sink many community initiatives.
In short: Want to know what your members want from their online community? Just ask.
Need help or support with community member research?
Customer & member research is a core part of my community development practice at Structure3C. If you are starting a new community or crowd initiative, or are evolving an existing program, Structure3C can plan and deliver community member research to build a strong foundation for your program. If you have questions, please get in touch.
