Most research starts from zero. Every new question means a new recruit, a new screener and weeks before the first answer comes back. For a question you ask once a year, that is fine. For a company with a question about its customers every few weeks, it is slow and expensive, and the people answering are different every time.
What a research community is
A research community is a standing group of real customers or end users, recruited and verified once, who agree to take part in short activities over many months. It can be business to business, such as a few hundred commercial technicians who install and repair your equipment, or consumer, such as a thousand people who buy your product every week. Members answer quick polls, react to concepts on a discussion board, keep diaries, join live online groups and test products at home or on the job.
The question it answers
A community handles the steady stream of smaller questions that never justify a full study: which of three designs, what goes wrong on a typical service call, whether a change made a difference. Because the same people answer over time, you can go back to them the week after a finding with a follow-up, or check months later whether a fix worked.
How we run it
We recruit from our own databases and from the places your users already are, screen for the profile you need, and verify every member: a license or employer check for professionals, a photo task for consumers. We hold members' personal details. You see member numbers and profiles. We plan a quarterly calendar, cap how often anyone is asked, thank members for each activity, and replace about six percent of the community each quarter so the mix stays typical.
What you get
A quarterly report like the sample below: who is in the community, who took part, what each activity found and what was decided because of it. A quick poll closes in about 48 hours, where recruiting fresh professionals for the same question can take three to four weeks. Over a year, the cost of building the community spreads across dozens of questions, and the cost and time per question fall every quarter.
Where it goes wrong
Ask too often and members burn out, leaving only the most eager. Keep the same members too long and they start answering like insiders. A community is your engaged users, not the whole market, so sizing and share questions still need fresh sample. And members who never hear what happened to their input stop giving it, so every quarter should close with a short note telling them what changed.
The sample below shows one quarter for two fictional communities: a B2B group of commercial HVAC and refrigeration technicians and a consumer group of home bakers. Click the tabs to move between them and to see how recruiting, incentives, privacy and refresh work. Every brand, member and number is invented.
Illustrative only. All brands, members, quotes and figures are fictional. Open the sample full screen.