The Smartest
Person in the Room:
Your Customers through
smart insight communities

An insight community is generally made up of a targeted group of stakeholders, usually customers, who are recruited into a private online environment to participate in a company’s or brand’s research-related activities on an ongoing basis. The purpose of the insight community is to secure actionable insights from customer feedback in order to drive business decisions.

Assuming you’re looking for a full-service provider and your goal for the community is to secure actionable insights for better and faster decision making within the organization, there are four main criteria that we recommend assessing: platform capability, research team capability, service approach, and overall value.

The total number of members needed in an insight community depends on your business goals, who your target customer is, and your overall budget. Generally, My-Take suggests that you aim for between 500-600 members in your insight community. Response rates and engagement will also play a part in this determination.

An insight community will be valuable whether it’s branded or unbranded, and the choice you make is dependent on your needs and objectives. A branded insight community offers a transparency that can be useful for testing real campaign ideas and concepts. Unbranded insight communities are an opportunity to get feedback from consumers who aren’t familiar with your products and solutions. To decide what’s right for you, you need to first establish your goals and objectives for the community.

Maintaining engagement in an insight community requires that you first start by screening in the right members, clearly communicating the objectives of the community, and providing regular and meaningful content. Other considerations are how you approach and recognize your members.

Most companies use insight communities because they are cost-effective, efficient, accessible, and they represent the way that customers often want to interact with companies. However, there are certain types of research projects that do require specialty research tools. An insight community can be a primary market research tool, while other tools could be used for some projects. Your community is a cost-effective, versatile, and flexible tool that can handle the majority of your research needs, as well as complement other efforts.

There are many different skills and traits that make up a great community insights manager, from passion, responsiveness, training, and communication skills. My-Take believes there are ten elements that make up a great community insights manager.

The My-Take platform supports multiple languages.