Building business value with an insight community: Lessons from The Knot

If you want to see what an insight community can really do, watch one work under pressure. That’s exactly what Sam Joneswood of The Knot Worldwide walked us through at Quirk’s New York 2026.

The Knot is the leading wedding planning platform, connecting millions of couples each year with the venues, florists, photographers, and other pros who bring a wedding to life. So yes, we spent a whole session talking about weddings. Fitting, since a good insight community is all about the perfect match.

This co-hosting gig was totally unplanned. Our CEO Andrew Reid got caught in flight re-routes and cancellations, so if you were in the room for our session: I’m sorry, and you’re welcome! ;) The good news is Sam more than carried it, walking the room through case studies, community management tips, AI-driven knowledge bases, and more.

Why The Knot said “yes” to a community

Weddings are a genuinely unusual category to research. The Knot has a narrow window with each couple, most of whom don’t engage until there’s a ring on the finger, and they move through planning milestones fast, sometimes week to week. The usual slow, quarterly cadence just doesn’t fit.

It’s also deeply emotional in a way most purchases aren’t.

“There’s very few other purchases that just have so much emotion tied to them,” Sam pointed out. “For many of our couples, this really is the first step forward in life with their significant other.”

The push to rebuild their insights community came down to three gaps. First, they needed richer behavioral insight. They had plenty of on-site data and could see where couples moved through the flow, but not the motivation behind it. Why does a couple hire a photographer, a videographer, or both? The clicks didn’t say.

Second, there’s a real generational gap between The Knot’s execs and their couples. As Sam put it, “a wedding held thirty years ago looks very, very different than one held today.” Leadership needed a real aperture into the modern couple.

Third, they wanted to get further upstream. Since couples don’t show up until they’re engaged, The Knot wanted a research community that could reach them earlier, the ones who’ve been dating a couple of years and just know, to understand what triggers that next step.

Choosing Rival to rebuild an insight community

Sam talked to several top insight community platforms on the market, and, spoiler alert, they landed on Rival. During our session, she got candid about why it stood out.

Mobile first. Their legacy community ran on email, and it had quietly stopped working. Couples were spinning up brand-new shared wedding email addresses, routing everything there, and then never checking the inbox. The community needed to live where couples already were.

“We knew they were using their phones all the time to look for wedding inspiration and to communicate with wedding vendors, so we needed to be where they were,” Sam explained.

Speed, on quant and qual. With such a short window and couples moving weekly, the community had to keep pace.

Unlimited video. This was the real unlock for the exec problem above. Video feedback let The Knot show leadership what wedding planning actually looks and feels like today.

“Unlimited video is a huge priority for us. When I talked about our execs not really grasping what wedding planning looks like, video was the key to really illustrate it. See the emotion on their faces, the roommates in the background, the significant other playing video games while someone’s doing our survey.”

Easy member management. With couples cycling in and out, easy offboarding matters as much as easy onboarding, so The Knot needed a powerful insight community platform that made both simple.

Like many Rival customers, Sam said Rival’s customer success team has been a big bonus. The Knot was new to mobile-first, text-based research, so having experts on hand mattered.

Using the community for strategic and tactical initiatives

What I loved most: Sam didn’t talk about community in the abstract. She walked us through three very different studies, all run off the same one.

The two-sided marketplace mystery

The Knot connects couples with vendors, and something was breaking down. Vendors would get an inquiry, send pricing and availability, then hear nothing back. From their side, it looked like a bad lead. So Sam went to the community to find out.

The truth: couples were overwhelmed by choice. They were genuinely interested in multiple vendors but had no time to reach out to each one. Because community members have full profile attributes attached, including exactly where they are in the journey, The Knot could run a longitudinal study to map where communication went cold. Those insights now feed a CRM and app-notification revamp that nudges couples to close out conversations they’ve already moved on from.

The social media algorithm pulse

Sam had heard couples describe their feeds shifting as they planned. Find a venue, and suddenly it’s all photographers and florists. Were couples actively steering those algorithms?

This one didn’t need a big longitudinal build, just a fast pulse. The finding: engaged couples, who skew a little older around thirty to thirty-five, mostly weren’t manipulating their feeds. Pre-engaged couples absolutely were.

“We were able to give our executive team a really quick answer and say, this isn’t something y’all need to worry about right now,” Sam shared. “But within two to three years, we need to be prepared.”

Listening Sessions

This was my favorite, because it ladders straight up to a CEO-level mandate. The Knot’s newer CEO is focused on customer obsession, and the insights team was tasked with bringing the couple closer to the rest of the company. So Sam built Listening Sessions, recruiting community members for moderated focus groups. The reach so far: over three hundred employees hearing directly from customers.

Speed is what makes it possible. Sam can recruit, onboard, and prep participants, most of whom have never done a focus group, in about a week, and she knows they’re at exactly the right planning stage because the community already tells her. One session brought together six couples who’d all had to change their wedding date, for reasons ranging from a windfall to a future father-in-law’s illness. That depth of participant knowledge isn’t something you can easily get from a market research panel you don’t own.

Knowledge bases: Making insights available to those who need them

From case studies, we turned to knowledge bases. Here, a knowledge base is a searchable, AI-accelerated hub that pulls together everything an insights team knows, from community feedback and ad hoc studies to syndicated and transactional data, so stakeholders can ask a question and get an answer in real time. The value is obvious: a great community generates a lot of insight, and the hard part is getting it to stakeholders who aren’t researchers. Done well, it can amplify the ROI of your insight community.

Sam shared her guardrails:

• Keep the scope tight. Be deliberate about what goes in, whether syndicated, transactional, or pure insights and research.
• Add thin-evidence warnings. Flag small samples so nobody treats a base of ten as gospel, and label anything that should be read only directionally.
• Build a trust score. Give people a clear signal for how confident to be in a given output.
• Point back to the researchers. Put your team’s contact info right in the output so the knowledge base surfaces experts instead of replacing them.

If you’re building one, connect it to your community through an MCP or similar so it keeps getting enriched. And make sure the insights team is in the room when the guardrails get set.

It’s all about the experience

In the end, The Knot’s community works because they prioritize the member experience, which drives engagement, speed, and better data.

A community that’s mobile first, easy to join, and rich with profile data isn’t just nicer for members. It’s what lets you run a longitudinal study, a same-week pulse, and a fleet of focus groups off one always-on resource. That’s the whole game.

Thanks to everyone who packed the room, and to Sam for making me look good while Andrew waved at us from Toronto.