Whether you are looking to build an online community for 3 weeks, 3 months or 3 years, communities247®can deliver to your needs; just let us know what they are. You can recruit customers, prospects, influencers, category rejecters or even employees on online communities with customised look and feel.
Online communities can help your organisation:
- open a window in your customers' lives
- inform all decisions with what your stakeholders think
- streamline all your qualitative research needs
- connect the dots between multiple ways of gathering information
Any organisation considering to deploy private online communities should know why they are doing this. This is the era of consumer engagement. Every brand and every organisation needs to create online platforms for open and continuous dialogue with their customers and stakeholders. Our communities247® platform has received a global gamification award from Ovum.
Who should be part of your community online, and what can you do with it?
- It can be a branded community for co-creation, a blind community for competitive market research online, or a multi-community platform with multiple native tools for online qualitative research.
- Community members can engage in market research activities using their desktop, tablet, or smartphone, in any language. Activity tools include: bulletin boards, video diaries, chat based focus groups, polls, wall conversations, and online surveys.
No need to spell out how communities247® is connected to sales growth, bottom line impact and general business performance improvement, right?
Our communities247® platform is a cost effective way to interact with your customers, prospects and key influencers, to conduct qualitative research and build brand advocacy with an engaged audience.
This online communities platform is available as a SaaS (Software as a Service) to marketing research, advertising and (social) media agencies as well as to end users i.e. brand owners and advertisers.
On request, DMR can provide a full or partial service in terms of creating and managing an online community for insights, co-creation and advocacy, be it branded or blind as to who the sponsor is.
| communities247® Features |
SaaS |
Full Service |
|---|---|---|
| Administration rights* | ✔ | X |
| Moderator/Facilitator rights* | ✔ | X |
| Member access rights | ✔ | ✔ |
| board247 | ✔ | ✔ |
| diary247 | ✔ | ✔ |
| chat247 | ✔ | ✔ |
| poll247 | ✔ | ✔ |
| IDI247 | ✔ | ✔ |
| Web responsive layout | ✔ | ✔ |
| Online Surveys | ✔ | ✔ |
| Export of Data/Image/Clips | ✔ | ✔ |
| Member Notifications | ✔ | ✔ |
| Reward Point System | ✔ | ✔ |
| Full White Label** | ✔ | X |
| Theme Customisation*** | ✔ | ✔ |
| Layout Customisation | ✔ | ✔ |
| Member Recruitment | X | ✔ |
| Member Incentive Handling | X | ✔ |
| Community Facilitator | X | ✔ |
| Discussion Guide Preparation | X | ✔ |
| Group Moderating | X | ✔ |
| Report Writing | X | ✔ |
| Presentation of Insights | X | ✔ |
| Survey Scripting | X | ✔ |
| Brand Ambassador Programme | X | ✔ |
*Admin/Moderator/Facilitator rights: in the full service solution, these functions are fulfilled by DMR
**Full White Label: includes a custom domain. It does not apply for full service since DMR will be providing a service so its brand will be exposed to the client.
*** Theme customisation means: custom logos, colours, banners for a set layout
Why Use an Online Community?
Online Communities offer deeper levels of engagement and interaction than consumer panels. Panels are useful tools for conducting regular standard surveys: you ask the questions and panellists provide responses in a fairly structured way.
However, through utilising social media research techniques, communities allow you to go much further. Not only can clients ask their online community members questions, but also members can interact with you and among themselves. And online communities allow you to do this in a much more flexible way.
You can take advantage of a range of innovative qualitative research methods – from online bulletin boards enhanced with rich media to chat groups. By overcoming the restrictions posed by more conventional research, communities can get you closer to your customers.
Private Online Communities for co-creation
A private online community offers you the flexibility to ask the questions you want, when you want, to an audience that’s switched on to your brand. It allows you to ask questions in new and engaging ways which provide you with more meaningful findings.
A community online is a valuable social media research resource for any marketing department – it can help with creating new products, adding new features to existing products and advertising.
Small in scale (with member numbers in the hundreds as opposed to thousands) the focus is on dialogue and interaction with the online community members. There are a raft of research tools and techniques that we have developed to help you interact with the community, and get you closer to your customers:
- Online bulletin boards/forums
- Video/photo diaries
- Online focus groups
- Online in-depth interviews
- Polls
- Evaluation of visuals
- Video clip evaluation
Private Online Community Panels for large scale research and branding
With larger scale online communities you get the best of both worlds: all the advantages of a community platform for increased dialogue and interaction with members, plus the ability to run larger sample quantitative surveys and marketing campaigns among your community group.
As the name suggests, quantitative panels are large scale communities – usually with many thousands of members. This enables you to segment your research among target groups and conduct full scale quantitative research.
Because of the size of the online community, it also presents an ideal platform for communicating marketing messages and developing advocacy among customers and key influencers.
In addition to all the functionality of smaller communities you can also break out sub-sets of audience for different purposes such as:
- Identifying trends
- Dialoguing with non clients
- Early adopters
Other Benefits of the Online Community Approach
- You only pay for sample once when you recruit the online community members for the first time and then you can use them as many times as you want for as long as they remain members.
- You can utilise the community for qualitative research online, quantitative surveys and for social listening to unstructured conversations.
- You can get results faster and cheaper.
- You may use the online community for marketing and for R&D in addition to online market research in an ad-hoc manner
How can DMR help?
DMR are experts in creating online communities for market research and marketing applications.
We can develop online communities with a focus on discussion and co-creation for your brand, and depending on your requirements, we can scale-up the community to conduct robust quantitative research and broader marketing activity.
DMR can help:
- Increase your Revenue by helping you create better products for your customers
- Reduce your Cost by leveraging the internet, community panels, the social web
- Reduce or Eliminate your Risk to fail with your marketing investment
- Make your lives Easier by providing you with actionable business insights that will make success look like a walk in the park!
