It's been more than a decade now that online communities have been available in market research and they’ve taken on a lot of different forms. Short term communities can be a great way to bring people together around a specific topic and long-term communities are an excellent foundational tool for a brand’s larger and longer term goals. Today, we’ll dive a little bit deeper into the value of and required commitments for longer term communities and how to assess what’s right for you.

The very first question you should ask yourself when your organization is considering launching a longer term community is: What the goals are?

Once you figure that out, you will want to ask yourself the following: Do you want an on-tap resource? Will you primarily be conducting surveys, or will there be a qualitative component? Are you prepared to communicate with the participants on a daily or weekly basis? What kind of staff do you have internally to manage it or what are you willing to spend with an external partner? Is it a high engagement category? How will you source the participants?

When we are walking potential clients through those questions, we often uncover that they aren’t clear about the goals or what it’s going to take to get there. Fortunately, we can help with that!

With proper planning, oversight, and engagement, there is no tool more powerful tool than a long term community. This methodology can serve as a tracking study and an organic listening device all wrapped into one. If branded, you can easily create ambassadors for your offering by letting them know how impactful their feedback is. As an industry, I think we sometimes forget that market research can, and should be, fun for the participants. Communities are unique in that they can act as an ideation playground for both researchers and participants alike.

10K Humans has many unique offerings that can support your communities and help maintain them. We create engagement content – items that keep your members coming back for more, as well as community health reports to help illuminate what activities are most productive and how to optimize it.

If you’d like to hear more about what we’ve learned over the past decade and how we do things differently, let's chat.

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Features:
— Expert analysis provides detailed understanding of the beneficiaries you serve, your peers in the non-profit sector, your generous donors, and more.
— Eagerness to partner with causes of all scopes and sizes, from international charities to individual teams.
— Services offered pro bono or at cost for qualifying entrants, furthering the social impact of your cause.

Projects:
— Partnering with scholars across the academic landscape, we’re efforting to humanize the transgender population by understanding how they score on normal variables of personality and gender-stereotyped behavior. This large-scale quantitative project focuses on and engages with the transgender community as people, rather than as a clinical, pathologized population. Uniting academics from Loyola Marymount University, Northeastern University, and University of Rhode Island, this work aims to add to the incomplete body of scholarship on transgender people.
— Working alongside Lindz Amer and Queer Kid Stuff, we’ve conducted a multi-part brand awareness study to establish awareness of the brand and Amer’s new book Rainbow Parenting. In over twenty in-depth interviews and a rigorous quantitative survey phase, we’ve uncovered valuable insights into opportunities for customer engagement and opportunities to bolster customer financial support.
— Supporting HoMie, an Australian-based charity tackling youth homelessness, by testing innovative software from Research Goat. By conducting in-depth interviews via a variety of methods, we’ll unearth crucial insights about the customer experience at HoMie, and follow up with a large-scale quantitative survey to understand the charity’s reach.
— Assisting Hands on Tokyo as they endeavor to address disability rights and environmental issues in Japan. In response to one of Hands on Tokyo’s inspiring live events, we delivered a video reel and additional content, both featuring enhanced accessibility for Japanese and English speakers.