Want to Know What Community Members Need? Just Ask.

Are you “Customer Shy”?

In its most basic form, a community strategy is a balance of an organization’s goals and its member's (a.k.a customer's) needs. Organizations have methodologies for developing goals and objectives, yet I continue to be surprised at how many organizations are missing research as a core part of their online community development process. Even for organizations that are highlighted as examples of “getting it”, there are still cases where the community wasn’t engaged in research about a major platform change, feature enhancement or policy shift. In many cases there seems to be a real fear (or at the very least, discomfort) in connecting 1:1 with customers. That fear could be rooted in the inability to have meaningful interaction at scale, the overhead associated with regular contact, or the lack of an evolved organizational culture that encourages this type of interaction. Any community development (or refinement) initiative *requires* the input and direction of the constituent members.

Note: I will be using the terms “member” and “customer” interchangeably in this post. I will also use the term “member” as a placeholder for current and potential members of a community.

Why Conduct Member Research?

Conducting member needs research as part of the strategy development / refinement process brings the "voice of customer" to the center of the strategy, and helps create a lens through which to focus your community building activities. In essence, there are really five core questions to frame your community strategy:

1. WHO are your customers?
2. WHY are they motivated to build relationships with each other? 
3. WHERE do they want to build relationships with each other? 
4. HOW do they want to build relationships with each other? 
5. WHAT value can you provide as a HOST to strengthen and deepen these relationships over time? 

Member research can also help answer more tactical questions like:

• What role should you play as host, and what community activities should you facilitate?
• What types of content and features should be present in the community?
• What should the community ecosystem look like: which activities should be an “on domain” destination, what role should partner / independent communities play, how do mass social networks fit in, and increasingly: how can you facilitate in person events and meetups?
• What should the membership / leadership structure look like?
• What type of culture does the community need to thrive?
• What activities are members prepared to participate in that will directly or indirectly benefit the host?
• What types of marketing and advertising would members find acceptable?

Techniques for Conducting Member Research

The process for conducting member research is straightforward: decide on the appropriate techniques given your budget, recruit subjects, conduct the research and analyze the results.

Recruiting

Great places to recruit research subjects:

• Your existing community members
• Your MVP / Lead User programs
• Your blog
• Your corporate web site
• Partners
• Newsletter mailing lists
• Customer conferences
• Independent communities about your product, or focused on the market space or topical areas you serve
• Facebook or Linkedin groups about your product or in your market or topic area
• Using social network analysis tools like LittleBird or NodeXL to analyze open networks like Twitter.

One on One Interviews

One on one interviews can be conducted in-person, via web conference or over the phone. The key ingredients are a customer, an interviewer, a notetaker and a simple interview script (a sample can be found below). Interviews can be as short as 30 minutes, and generally should last no more than an hour. In my experience, a minimum of 5-6 interviews will yield useful themes and give good data for strategy direction. If your community will serve many different products, market segments, or customer types a good rule of thumb is to try and do interviews with at least 3 people from each segment. 1:1 interviews can also be augmented nicely by a follow up online survey to a larger group, in order to drill down further on issues uncovered in the initial round of interviews. Interviews can be conducted in person, via a hangout (or other video chat service), or over the phone.

Group Sessions

Another great way to get feedback, and to get a lot of feedback at once, is to conduct a group feedback session. This is similar to the one on one interviews, except you are guiding a group of members through the script, as opposed to just one. Involving multiple subjects at once increases the complexity of the process, so be sure to have someone skilled at facilitation leading the session to keep the conversation on track (per the script), as well as to ensure that all participants have equal air time to give their opinions and feedback.

Online Surveys

The fastest, and often lowest overhead way to get member feedback is to create a short online survey to send to research participants. Online surveys are really great at getting quick quantitative feedback, and the results (depending on the tool) are fairly easily to analyze and study. In our practice at Structure3C we use generally use Typeform, which has a nice balance of ease of use and quality of experience for survey respondents.

A few things to keep in mind with online surveys: the quality of the results depends largely on 1) reaching a representative sample target members and 2) on the quality of the questions asked. Time spent crafting an effective survey, and in particular, thinking through appropriate choices for multiple choice questions, will yield higher quality results.

In most cases for the community and social media strategy work I do at Structure3C, I will generally start with an online survey to at least 100 community members,and follow up by conducting a set of 7-10 one on one interviews with community members.

Questions to Ask During Research

As I mentioned at the start of the article, there are essentially 5 overarching questions for your community strategy, 4 of which can be answered as an output of member research. The fifth question, "What value can you create as host?", can be answered (accurately)after member research.

Key Questions:

1. Why do community members want to build relationships with each other? What do community members need from each other? Explore what community members might desire from interactions with other community members, and try to understand why they are motivated to sustain this activity over time. Answers could range from knowledge sharing, to providing mentoring, to ongoing professional or personal support.
2. Where do you customers want to build relationships with each other? This question is particularly important to avoid duplicating community features and value that exist elsewhere. The key insight to uncover in this line of questioning is what unique value you can provide in your hosted community AND which external communities and social media sites you need to participate in in order to create a holistic community presence. Increasingly, mobile presents a unique opportunity to host your customer network in fundamentally new ways.
3. How do members want to build relationships with each other? What value can community members contribute / exchange? It is important to understand what ways community members are capable of, prepared to and willing to participate. Participation could include sharing domain expertise, offering content samples, answering support questions, or even just participating in casual online conversation.
4. What do community members need from you as the host? Ask questions that explore member expectations of your organization in the role of host. What are the member expectations around your level of participation, your effort in developing content, in fostering participation and your commitment to hosting the community long-term?

In order to answer the key questions, you will need to ask a series of baseline demographics questions (for context), as well as exploring each of the four key questions in a more granular way. A sampling of questions that can be used to create a script or facilitation guide are included below.

A simple list of survey or interview questions might include:

• Name, organization, title, a brief role description
• Browser and mobile preferences: Chrome vs Safari, iOS vs Andriod, etc.
• What information sources do you rely on (relating to the topic of the community)?
• What groups (on/offline) are you a member of (relating to the topic of the community)?
• What products / services do you use (relating to the topic of the community)?
• What is the biggest challenge you face in your day to day work (assuming this relates to the topic of the community)?
• How satisfied are you with the level and type of communication you have with organization x?
• Do you currently participate in any of the following social media activities: blogging, discussion forums, facebook, twitter, youtube etc (shape the list based on your market)
• What information, insight or content do you want to share with other members?
• What kinds of information would be helpful for other customers to share with you?
• If organization x were to offer the following content or features, please rate how useful each would be to you (list potential community features and content and use a Likert scale for measurements): discussion forums, expert Q&A, tutorials & tips, video previews, customer blogs, etc.
• Would you be interested in connecting with other members at local, in-person events?
• Exploring usability issues around current experiences and apps

In Summary:

I’ve seen investment in member research pay off consistently, just as I’ve seen the severe cost of not conducting member research hamper or sink many community initiatives. In short: Want to know what your members want from their online community? Just ask.

Customer & member research is a core part of our community development practice at Structure3C. If you are starting a new community or crowd initiative, my team can plan and deliver community research to build a strong foundation for your programs. If you would like to book time to discuss, please feel free to find some time on my schedule here.