An insight community is a long-term, continuous, always-on research space where members can log in and participate whenever it is convenient for them. Unlike a standalone research project, it enables ongoing engagement between the business and its members. Communication is two-way. You can ask questions, while members can share their views, experiences, and needs, providing access to more organic insights. Peer-to-peer interactions allow members to share knowledge, discuss experiences, and support one another, creating a deeper understanding for the business.
But for the community to flourish, you need engaged members. Actively managing engagement is key. This involves regularly doing more with platform members outside of research to foster habits and encourage members to regularly log in, creating a core community of participants. An engagement strategy is a structured plan for how you attract, involve, and retain community members over time. It’s a plan that outlines the activities, content, communications, and incentives that encourage members to participate in between research tasks and build stronger connections with the community. Rather than focusing solely on increasing overall community numbers, an effective engagement strategy aims to deepen participation and foster meaningful interactions.
In all research communities, you’ll have people who are more engaged than others. To show expected levels of engagement layers within a community, I like to talk about the engagement triangle as shown below.
The Engagement Triangle
Essentially, your core community members are at the top. These are your most active and visible members. Whereas the bottom of the triangle is your total number of members who’ve made accounts, logged in, but perhaps engage very little, if at all!
You would typically see around 5% of your members taking part in forum discussions, 25% taking part in quick polls and typically larger numbers taking part in direct incentives research tasks. A lot of members may login once and then never engaged. So, they should be churned out after 6 months or so to make space for new, potentially more engaged members.
So, when looking at your engagement strategy, your aim is to grow your core group of community members and get members moving from the lower layers to the higher ones. As better engagement leads to better quality insights generated and increased customer salience
Behavioural science tells us that people are far more likely to participate when they identify with a group. A sense of belonging is one of the strongest drivers of engagement. When members feel like they're part of a community, not just participants in research, they're naturally more motivated to contribute and engage.
When members feel part of something, they are more motivated and willing to engage. When they feel valued for their contributions, they are more willing to engage. When they feel listened to, they are more willing to engage. So, collaborating with members is key to improving engagement.
Collaborating boosts engagement because it:
The most effective engagement strategies are designed around an understanding of human behaviour. Drawing on behavioural science enables organisations to create communities that encourage participation by making engagement feel easy, socially rewarding, and meaningful. Incorporating features such as status bands, feedback loops, and time-limited activities can help increase and sustain engagement over time.
Engagement surveys can be a good way to check in with your community. It’s a way to see if the community matches their expectations, gain feedback, and discover what topics are important to members. While it may not be possible to plan and run full research around the topics, you can plan engagement content on topics that are mentioned a lot. By asking members for their input and using this to drive part of your engagement content plan member will feel listened to.
For example, if a high number of members wrote in and wanted to discuss X, then if you plan discussions around X into your content calendar, they’ll feel listened. Basically, you’ve collaborated with members to produce content that resonates with them. This will lead to higher engagement, happier members and will grow your core community. It’s a small way to co-create with your community and creates a sense of ownership
Engagement Management Matrix for Content Planning
I’d recommend planning your engagement content a month to six weeks in advance. This ensures the content is up-to date and relevant but also leaves room for flexibility. If there’s something in the news that is relevant to your business or that could be of interest to your community members, you can work this into your plan.
When I plan engagement content, I use a context matrix to ensure the content is useful for the stakeholders and interesting to members. There are 4 areas to this from pure engagement content, business content, project content, and topical content. All areas are key to ensuring a successful engagement plan. The top side of the quadrant required me to collaborate with the business to gain an understanding of their needs and upcoming research requirements. While the bottom two quadrants use creativity and industry/topical news.
Do remember that a community should be two-way. Don’t just give your members task after task with nothing in return. To get the most from your members, reduce those disengaging and gain deeper insights, remember to give your members something in return. Behavioural science highlights the importance of reciprocity. If members repeatedly give their time without hearing how its make an impact, participation begins to feel transactional. By simply sharing how their feedback influenced decisions creates a reciprocal relationship, showing their efforts matter and increases trust and future participation
An update on how insights have been used can make a huge difference to a member who regularly completes 10/to 15-minute surveys for you. Their time is valuable, and while you may have incentives for the survey with a prize draw, the likelihood of them winning could be low. By giving a short topline update after the project, members will appreciate that you’ve taken the time to report back, and they can understand that by taking part, it’s made a real difference. We all want to feel recognized and acknowledged for our efforts, so collaborating with stakeholders to get this goes a long way with members. Remember, those who feel valued will continue to participate. This feedback builds trust and helps foster more authentic and genuine relationships with your members.
The biggest misconception about community engagement is that people participate because they're incentivised to. But behavioural science tells us something different. Great customer communities aren't built by asking people to engage more. They're built by creating an environment where that is the natural mode.