Breathing In, Breathing Out: Finding a Rhythm for Insight Communities

This article is part of the Communities Summit 2020 Series. Sign up for free to hear Katharine and her FlexMR colleague Paul Hudson share their expertise in ‘Convergence, Creativity and Collaboration: What’s Next for Insight Communities?’


Over the course of their short but influential history, online research communities have excelled at one skill in particular. Bringing things together. Whether it’s customers and consumers into a shared space, or multiple research methodologies for greater depth; communities are a place for coalescence. In recent years, integrating the scale of panels has even allowed communities to become a hub for both qualitative and quantitative data.

But this all shares a common theme – drawing information together. Or, to use a metaphor: breathing in.

While there is certainly more room to grow in this capacity, it has left one area of community innovation pipelines underserved for years. Breathing out. The way in which that central storage unit of data can be distributed across the business and inform data-driven decision making.

It’s this critical function that we believe will expand across the next decade. But, as developers start to scope such upgrades, here’s three simple ways you can get your insight community to breathe out more often.




1. Delegate Access Controls

Perhaps the most simple step that can be taken to improve business engagement with an insight community is to delegate and provide access to decision makers. An example of democratising data, controlled access may mean enabling key audiences to view live projects, manipulate the data of closed tasks or even submitting briefs in a streamlined manner.

Of course, delegation must be carefully considered. The exact permissions that non-researchers are provided must strike a careful balance of engaging enough to be used but restricted enough to ensure control of the platform is retained. This balance can often best be found by first considering the end goal, and incrementally increasing access from zero until that objective can reasonably be fulfilled.


2. Create Collaborative Environments

With a greater number of stakeholders and decision makers working within an insight platform, it’s important to foster a sense of collaboration among team members. The more active teams are within an insight community, the more often it will be used as part of decision-making processes.

This is where researchers take on the role of active facilitators; looking for shared concerns among research participants and bringing decision makers together around finding cross-business solutions. Creating this environment may even mean moving outside of the bounds of the insight platform itself, sharing regular notes, challenges or objectives in company bulletins, newsletters and updates. The options are varied, but they must be in pursuit of building a shared sense of ownership over the insight community, and feedback within.


3. Develop Creative Outputs

Finally, while much emphasis is often placed on data manipulation – the same is rarely true of reporting formats. However, communities offer the perfect place to experiment with and develop creative reporting techniques. From translating qualitative comments into works of art, to producing easy-to-digest animated summaries; the always on nature of insight communities provide a fertile testing ground.


Join us at the Communities Summit 2020, where we’ll be discussing how these three techniques (and others) can help your insight communities drive better decisions.


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