Community Panel

In this section, you will find learning resources that relate to designing, setting up, recruiting, engaging, researching a Community Panel or Community.

What is a Community Panel?

A Community Panel is an online community which is created and maintained to conduct quantitative and qualitative market research. A Community Panel is like having a large number of your customers always connected and ready to answer your questions, your small questions as well as your big questions.

What a Community Panel is not, and therefore what it is

In some ways it is easier to define a Community Panel in terms of what it is not, i.e. defining its differences with its closest neighbours and thereby making what it is clearer.

Not an access panel. An access panel is used to conduct research for many organisations. The tasks from an access panel tend to utilise a variety of questionnaire formats, styles and conventions and will tend not to respect the respondent experience. A Community Panel has a relationship with a specific brand (or in some cases a specific topic), the member is respected, and the relationship longitudinal.
Not an open branded community, for example MyStarbucksIdea. Open branded communities tend to be self-selecting, more relevant to marketing than market research, less controlled, and less ‘scientific’. Community Panels tend not to be open to all viewers, more controlled, and designed for market research.
Not a Market Research Online Community [MROC], using Brad Bortner’s definition of an MROC as a qualitative market research community. MROCs tend to be much smaller than Community Panels, they can be either short-term or long-term, and because of the strong interactions between the community members and between the members and the moderators they are unable to support quantitative research. By contrast a Community Panel can be used for both quantitative and qualitative research.

Community Panel -

- An Overview

This section provides a number of resources that provide overviews on Community Panel, or cover all the aspects that make up a Community Panel. By contrast, the sections below contain resources that focus on specific aspects of running and managing Community Panels.

- Planning & Set-up

Once you have decided to move forwards with creating a Community Panel to meet your research needs, the step is to plan out your panel before proceeding through the steps involved in technical set up.

- Blind or Branded

Community Panels are often referred to as either 'branded' or 'blind'. These terms correspond to the nature of the relationship the community panel owner chooses to create with the membership.

- Profiling Questionnaire

The Profiling Questionnaire is a short survey or form that prospective members fill out in order to join a community panel. Submitting their information in the PQ will generate their login information and represents ‘single opt-in’ (to become a full member they need to double opt-in through a confirmation email).

- Recruitment

In this section you will find learning resources relating to the process of recruiting members to a Community Panel, whether at the outset of your panel, later as part of a re-stage and refresh, or on an ongoing 'trickle through' basis.

- Panel Management

The Panel Management section includes resources that relate to the day-to-day running of your Community Panel, once it has been recruited. Included within Panel Management are resources on Health, Analytics, Engagement, Incentives, Operations and Data Privacy / Security.

- Engagement

'Engagement' is a fundamental tenet of Panel Management practice. Here you will find ideas and best practices about how best to engage your Community Panel members.

- Health & Analytics

The health you your Community Panel is much like the health of a humen being: it represents the aspects of well-being that need to be in place for the whole to function and perform well.

- Data Quality

Data Quality is a hot topic when it comes to online research. Here are some thoughts and considerations about data quality in relation to Community Panels.

- Data Privacy & Security

Data privacy and security is a priority for Community Panels, since the recruitment, profiling and research processes involve the capture and storage of data about individual, including personally identifying data such as email, name and other contact information.