Hugh Carling
Co-founder of Liveminds. I love to bring like-minded people together. Whether that's growing businesses, running online communities, staging events or captaining my village cricket team, nothing makes me happier than seeing people with a shared passion, coming together and making the most of it.
Over the years we’ve conducted and overseen hundreds of online qualitative research projects, we’ve seen the good, the bad and the ugly! From our experience we’ve learned that by putting certain foundations in place prior and during research programmes you can go a long way towards ensuring your project is successful and your insight is meaningful.
So, what are these foundations and how will they help?
Relevant recruitment – Recruit people who will find the topic relevant. It will come as no surprise that participants will contribute more frequently and have more to say when they hold a vested interest in the topic of discussion, when the topic is relevant to them. Naturally these people will be more enthusiastic about taking part.
However, making sure the topic holds relevance isn’t always easy, particularly when you’ve been asked to research the height of shelves or colour of bananas in a supermarket. This is where the importance of foundation number two jumps into action, incentives.
Enticing incentive – If you want to get the most from your participants you must offer an enticing incentive package. The convenience of online research often leads to researchers offering participants a lower incentive to that offered for offline research. This shouldn’t be done, and from experience often backfires. Online incentives should be calculated based on the estimated time you envisage participants having to engage with the project. Similar to offline research, participants should be paid between £30-£40 per hour of their time. Remember to also bear in mind the amount of time it will take participants to upload media and reply to your researcher probes. To add an additional level of engagement and enthusiasm you could offer a prize (financial or novel) to the participant/s who contribute the most. The aim here isn’t to create a competitive environment but to encourage participants to provide as much details as possible. This can be really effective.
Welcome participants – Send participants a welcome letter prior to the research taking part and then reiterate ‘the welcome’ on the project ‘notice board’. Be personable, introduce yourself and your research team, encourage participants to introduce themselves, upload a picture. Talk participants through the broad research objectives and discuss what is expected from them during the project and how long it is expected for. Highlight how they will be rewarded for taking part and the importance of their participation.
Early activation – Send out activation emails early to ensure participants register their accounts prior to the research starting. Doing this and ‘the welcome’ at least a day in advance ensures participants can hit the ground running when the project opens.
Simple software – Make sure your participants know how to use the software. A good online platform should do most of this for you and make taking part as easy as possible for participants, Liveminds does. The last thing you want is participants wasting their time learning how to use the platform, this is valuable time that could be spent answering your research questions & tasks. Liveminds has been designed with this top-of-mind and can with confidence, claim to be the most user friendly platform on the market.
Tailored discussion guide – Online platforms require questioning/tasks to be structured in a particular way. You should be aware of this and familiarise yourself with the structure prior to writing your discussion guide so that you can optimise its effectiveness. A good online platform provider should be able to offer you guidance, advise and support with this as it can take a bit of getting used to. One thing we always recommend is to drip feed questions into the project in categories and avoid presenting participants with a great big wall of questions right from the start, this can be very daunting for them. Pre schedule questions/tasks to be released and visible to participants at different stages throughout the project. Stick to 1 or 2 question/task categories per day.
Moderate your project – The real value of online qualitative comes when you actively engage with your participants and stimulate further debate as you would offline. This is why good moderation is key to a really successful project. You should moderate to acknowledge your participants, probe for additional insight and build new discussion areas. Consider inviting your client to give feedback and be their ‘voice’ within the project. It’s really motivating for participants to know the people that ‘can make it happen’ are listening and interested in what they have to say. Please see our upcoming blogs for more tips and tricks for successful online moderation.
Setting these foundations in place can go a million miles towards ensuring your online qualitative projects are successful. Please feel free to comment here and share your own tips & tricks with others.
