When doing any kind of research, it’s common—and probably wise—to focus on rigour. A solid methodology provides foundations for sound insights. Sometimes, reality slaps us in the face, and all we’re left with is space for improvisation.
The shockwaves of the 2020 lockdown left most of us completely knocked out for a couple of weeks. Companies were no exception to that. In my case, after a few weeks of day-to-day administration at work, my team was eventually asked for a valuable contribution: What are our customers feeling? What do they need? What are they purchasing, if anything?
With little to no budget, we were asked to provide customer insights to help the organisation navigate uncertainty. We needed to understand the role of fashion during a global pandemic.
From the safety of our homes, my manager and I spent hours and hours on Teams video calls, envisioning new ways to approach participants for our studies. Without recruiting agencies, it wasn’t easy to gather people to interview. Besides, we needed quick feedback for an ever-evolving and highly volatile situation. After a few days, we came up with a solution: to create Mango’s Innovation Community. It was a platform for customer participation. We used our own social network profiles to promote it and quickly gained some members. To make it more than just a ‘panel’, we committed to sharing regular updates with our members explaining what we had learnt thanks to their participation in our studies.
Nowadays, the team has very successfully transformed this panel into a platform for our members to express their views on fashion in multidirectional conversations. We even invited some of them to important internal meetings, as you can see here.
What is a research community?
A research community is a space or platform to generate engaging and insightful conversations. Online communities are a commonly used research method, but they tend to last for a limited period. When we created this community, we wanted it to last, we longed for lasting relationships with its members.
When it works well, a research community can be a safe space to gather insights, explore new issues, and understand various points of view. From the user's perspective, it can be a fun way of expressing your feelings, thoughts, and concerns regarding a brand or a particular subject.
How (and what for) does it work?
A community must provide a safe space for all its members to share their views freely.
The basic principles are simple: we need to open up channels of communication for people to answer our questions. With time, these answers can be spontaneous and occur without any prompt from our side.
The prompt
It can be an email or simply a question typed in a channel (if we’re using a community platform, say Slack). What kind of questions should we be asking? A community is not a space for unbiased or quantitative research. However, it can be a great place to uncover unknown categories for our studies. It is also a great place to ask for recurring feedback on use, for example (How do people use garments on their day-to-day? How do they build their outfits?). Communities are also useful for gathering early feedback on delicate issues because we can build some trust with our participants. Usually, community members are the most engaged people with the brand or subject we’re studying, so they may have strong opinions while still being forgiving of some missteps: the key here is to be as open and transparent as possible. For a fashion brand, it can be a valuable setting to talk about DEI issues. It’s also perfect to easily test some early, not-so-ready prototypes.
Make sure the prompt is open and not leading. Best prompts ask participants to show and tell rather than just tell.
The answers
Analysing and drawing conclusions from biased answers can be tricky. However, insights from a community can inspire new perspectives on old issues. For example, they can spark a flame that will lead to deeper investigations on a subject.
The good thing about having a long-term community is that answers can be recovered and can prompt new questions. We can follow up on an issue and ask again or ask for elaboration on as many topics as we’d like. If we keep the members engaged, we can also sense some early shifts in perceptions or behaviours that may otherwise be difficult to grasp.
When interpreting answers, it’s critical to understand where they come from and their reach. We should think of them more as inspiration rather than solid insight.
The shareback
Providing feedback to our participants is essential to keep them engaged. Conversations need two sides, and a fruitful relationship must be reciprocally giving. Sharing back what we’re learning thanks to people’s participation is as important as asking them questions. This exercise of transparency is also critical to developing the trust that underlies candid critiques.
While sometimes confidentiality doesn’t allow us to share what we’re doing with some insights, we can definitely explain what we discovered thanks to the group’s participation.
The engagement
Keeping a community engaged is crucial. While we may be tempted always to be productive, some entertainment is necessary to keep people involved.
We shouldn’t be focused only on asking relevant questions but also on fostering conversations across the community on a regular basis. In our case, we regularly ask participants to share their daily looks, their latest wishlist items, or their takes on the latest trends. We’re not always using this information for our work, but we definitely benefit from the increased engagement while deepening the relationship with our members.
On a more practical level, compensations and incentives work well when we need more answers, which is only natural. If people are contributing and we’re profiting from that, it only makes sense to compensate them. Compensation doesn’t always have to mean hard cash, it can be complemented with early access to some items or features, for example, or with insider access to your work process. Our members love it when they get to talk to our designers, for example (and the feeling is mutual).
How can I build one?
The type of community we build depends on the available resources. There are a few basics:
Communication channels: Usually, this means emailing. We need to be able to reach our participants, and the easiest way is via email (if you’re thinking an app is better, I’d say yes, but no one will grant you the privilege of using their limited phone real estate just like that). There are various platforms; Mailchimp is one of the most popular.
Questionnaire tool: No matter what, we’ll be asking questions, making polls, or requesting feedback on specific issues. Tools such as Typeform or even Google Forms do the trick.
Database management: When we have lots of user data, we must manage it. Tools such as Airtable allow us to have a light CRM to make our lives much easier. However, be careful with the feared aspects of GDPR (if you’re in the EU, at least). Don’t overlook this!
Qualitative research: To perform interviews, we can do them in person (yes!), but it’s also useful to be able to do them remotely. For that, there are so many tools. Personally, I’m enjoying Whereby a lot.
There are more advanced tools that allow for a community to thrive, especially when it comes to generating multidirectional conversations. While there are more expensive research-community-oriented tools, some open-access ones, such as Slack or Discord, can also work out just perfectly.
The infrastructure is super important, but don’t obsess over perfection. Be transparent and allow your community members to give feedback and help you improve your processes. After all, it’s their community as well.
Building a community can be highly insightful and inspirational as an additional resource in our research process. Are you part of any community? Do you have experience building one? What other advice would you give to anyone building one?
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