As we head into 2025, the business landscape remains unpredictable. While inflation appears to be easing, consumer confidence remains shaky. The impact of the 2024 U.S. elections remains to be seen. In such times, research teams are feeling the pressure to deliver real-time, accurate insights that businesses need to stay competitive.

That's where insight communities come in. By making it easy to build lasting relationships with a group of consumers who have agreed to participate, these communities can act as an on-demand, always-on resource for insight teams to get actionable feedback. They offer a solution to the growing complexity of research - and the world around us - by turning participants from mere respondents into active, engaged contributors.

Beyond quick turnarounds that research communities are known for, they also offer unique solutions to a problem that has been plaguing the MR industry for a while but was increasingly topical this year: declining data quality. This issue has never been more urgent since poor-quality customer feedback can damage your team's reputation and lead to poor business decisions.

Here are 3 ways modern insight communities can help address data quality.

Recruit Real People: Know Your Participants

Data quality issues start at the source: your sample. With the rise of bots and survey farms, fraudulent responses have become a common problem. Anywhere between 4% to 24% of responses can be fraudulent if you're relying on low-quality market panels, according to a study from CASE.

Professional survey takers also contribute to the issue. If people are only interested in incentives and points, and are willing to lie to qualify for surveys, the data becomes unreliable.

Anywhere between 4% to 24% of responses can be fraudulent.

With a proprietary community, you control how participants are brought in. Our customer success team typically recommends a multi-channel recruitment approach because different channels have different strengths and weaknesses.

For branded communities, recruiting from real interactions with your customers is ideal. Whether you tap into your marketing database, intercept visitors on your website, invite event attendees from experiential marketing initiatives, or engage with your social media followers, you're likely to hear from a more diverse and authentic group of consumers.

For branded communities, recruiting from real interactions with your customers is ideal.

To ensure participants are who they say they are, there are additional verification steps you can take. At Rival Tech and Reach3, for instance, we use video feedback and photos to verify identities. Since our community engagements are mostly via SMS - a harder-to-fake channel than email - we can further reduce the chances of fraudulent participants.

SMS is a much harder channel to fake than email.

Combining a strong recruitment strategy with identity verification helps keep bad actors out and improves the reliability of your data. Inviting people you know into the conversation can give you confidence and peace of mind regarding the quality and thoughtfulness of the data coming out of your community.

Enhance Engagement: Get Ongoing, Authentic Insights

Engagement is another critical factor in data quality. When participants aren't engaged, they're more likely to drop out, straight-line responses, or avoid future surveys altogether.

Low engagement doesn't just slow you down; it also increases research costs, undermines trust in the process, and reduces market research ROI. Worse, it can harm your team's reputation in the long run.

After managing hundreds of insights communities over 25+ years, I know one thing for sure: the key to great engagement is an interesting, relevant and even fun survey experience. As researchers, we need to keep participants in mind - where they are in the moment they are answering your survey, how they're interacting, and what their expectations are.

Most community members will take your surveys on mobile. That's why when choosing an insight community vendor, it's not enough to be mobile-friendly - it should be mobile-first.

Are your questions worded in a way that a human would understand?

Keep your surveys short, too. Participants are often responding during "micromoments" - quick breaks between activities. At Rival, companies using our Community 2.0 solution are, on average, able to keep their LOI just four minutes long, without sacrificing the depth of insights. By building on what you already know about your participants, you can gather deep insights without burdening them with long surveys.

Survey design also plays a role here. We advocate for a conversational approach. This means making the experience feel like a natural conversation, not a test. This starts with how you write your survey itself. Is the tone friendly? Are your questions worded in a way that a human would understand?

It's not just about words, though. The participant-facing user interface on your insight platforms matters, too. Even with the right tone, if the survey UX feels rigid, the experience will still feel like a test.

When appropriate for your brand, you can also consider adding GIFs, emojis and memes. These fun elements that consumers already use in their daily lives can help "chattify" your surveys and enhance the respondent experience.

When building our customer research platform, we've been intentional in creating technology that's participant-first and maximizes engagement. This is why we have features like the following:

• An AI tool that make surveys more conversational, matching your brand's tone and voice
• "Message cards" that help you pre-program appropriate and relevant responses based on what the participant says
• Profile variables that help build participants' profiles over time, eliminating the need for long, repetitive surveys

With these community functionalities, Rival customers see a 60% response rate and 86% completion rate, and 65% of participants agree to take part in future surveys. That's the power of keeping the conversation going.

Iterative Learning: Get Better Insights Over Time

There's a common assumption that fresh participants for every research project are best, but my experience running research communities challenges that. Repeated participation from the same group does, in fact, lead to richer insights.

Over time, community members become familiar with your product or category and objectives, and they start offering more specific, thoughtful feedback. For example, one of our snack food customers found that long-term community members moved from surface-level feedback ("I like this product because it tastes great") to offering more detailed opinions on specific attributes like saltiness or texture. You can't get this level of detail and specificity from randomly recruiting new sample every time. You just can't.

Repeated participation from the same group does, in fact, lead to richer insights.

Leading insight community platforms also enable iterative learning. You don't have to cram all your questions into one long survey. Instead, you can take an agile approach, using shorter, conversational surveys to dig deeper into specific topics over time.

On the reporting side, new AI tools like Rival's AI Summarizer help you identify major themes from unstructured data quickly. Real-time sentiment analysis and transcription features also provide instant insights and enhance storytelling.

Better data quality and improved respondent experience

Community 2.0 offers benefits for both brands and consumers. For your business, it means higher-quality data, reliable insights, and the ability to track shifts in attitudes, emotions and behavior over time. For participants, it provides a platform where they feel heard and valued for their input.

In today's uncertain business environment, getting closer to your customers is key to future-proofing your brand. Insight communities provide a unique opportunity to build meaningful, ongoing relationships with your customers, helping you navigate the challenges ahead.

By embracing modern community management techniques, you'll gain the agility and deep consumer understanding necessary to drive growth in 2025 and beyond.

Looking to go deeper and learn ab out different insight community use cases? Book a meeting to talk to an expert from our team or watch our webinar.

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