Insight Communities:
Benefits and Best Practices for Research Teams
Get closer with your customers with insight communities
Business leaders today need to get high-quality insights fast. The problem? It’s increasingly hard to engage real people at a reasonable cost and catch them in moments that matter.
On the flip side, consumers are over traditional, test-like surveys and they're overwhelmed with requests to provide feedback.
An insight community addresses both the needs of researchers and consumers today. If you're wondering, how to use communities to improve your research and business outcomes, this guide has best practices and tips you can implement right away.
What are insight communities?
An insight community (sometimes referred to as an "insights community," a research community, market research community or research panel) is a group of consumers who’ve agreed to participate in ongoing research. Participants are recruited into a private and secure online environment where they can provide real-time, authentic feedback regularly.
An evolution of what was once called a market research online community (MROC), an insight community supports ongoing, longitudinal learning. It enables your brand to continuously get high-quality feedback—both quant and qual, as well as video feedback—from your most important audiences, whether they’re your customers, fans, employees, B2B targets, or a predefined segment of the market.
What makes an insight community a community?
A shared mission
Whether they’re regular consumers or just think your brand is doing amazing things, community members are invested in the final outcome.
Permission to engage again
Since community members agree to participate, you have a group of consumers who are willing to answer questions.
Iterative and longitudinal learning
Insight community features like Profile Variables make it easy to develop a deeper understanding of your members, send hyper-relevant activities, and get increasingly deeper feedback.
What are the key benefits of an insight community?
With customer preferences and technologies evolving quickly, brands today need a more efficient, impactful approach to customer insights. The right insight community platform offers this, and more.
How? It’s due to the fact that insight communities connect you with real humans—people who have explicitly agreed to share their feedback on an ongoing basis.
Strengths of an insight community
Putting humans at the core of your research delivers meaning business and research outcomes, including:
Real-Time, Actionable and High-Quality Insights: Access an engaged group for both long-term strategic insights and quick, tactical feedback—perfect for fast-paced decision-making. And because you know exactly how people are recruited, insight communities deliver high-quality data.
Data quality issues start at the source: your sample... With a proprietary insight community, you control how participants are brought in.
Increased Engagement & Loyalty: Engaging participants over time turns them into invested stakeholders, providing brands with richer, more relevant insights.
Cost Efficiency: Unlike traditional methods, insight communities reduce recruitment costs because you don't need to recruit every time you have a new project, creating an efficient, scalable approach to research.
Flexibility & Agility: Built for a digital-first world, today’s insight communities help brands track trends in real-time and adapt to customer needs as they happen.
High-Quality, Continuous Data: Insight communities allow for iterative research, building on previously collected data. Ongoing engagement with communities yields deeper insights that support better, more connected decisions.
In today’s data-driven landscape, insight communities are essential for brands aiming to stay responsive, competitive, and deeply connected to their customers.
What are the use cases for insight communities today?
Thanks to mobile-first tech, conversational research and AI, insight communities are more flexible and agile than ever before. They can support more use cases than ever before. Some common examples include:
- Foundational customer understanding
- Usage and attitudes
- Competitive analysis
- Brand fit
- Persona creation
- Segmentation
- Pricing evaluation
- Usability
- Ideation
- Co-creation
- Jobs to Be Done
- Hard-to-reach groups (e.g. Gen Zs)
- Feature evaluation
- Concept testing
- Front-end innovation
- Product testing
- IHUTs
- Mission diaries
- In-store product assessments Mobile diaries
- Mobile ethnographies
- Customer journey mapping Reasons to Believe
- Benefit claims
- Events and brand activations Sensory research
- NPS
- User research
- Message testing
Surprising insight community use cases
Thanks to the creativity of many research teams, interesting use cases of insight communities are emerging as well. For example, some media brands are monetizing their communities, helping ad partners connect with and understand consumers. Going beyond consumers, some research teams are also launching employee communities or B2B communities.
Branded vs blind / unbranded insight communities
Are you wondering if a branded or a blind community is better for you?
Branded insight communities, where community members are aware of the company conducting the research, offer a unique advantage by fostering deeper engagement and long-term relationships with customers who care about a brand. Because of the transparency on who's doing the research, participants provide more thoughtful and constructive feedback, often becoming more critical over time rather than simply offering praise.
This ongoing relationship results in richer insights, improved data quality, and a cost-effective research approach, as companies do not need to constantly recruit new participants.
Additionally, branded communities create a “virtuous circle of research,” where participants feel valued as they see how their input directly influences business decisions. Contrary to concerns about bias, long-term engagement often leads to more discerning and honest responses, ultimately strengthening the brand’s strategy and decision-making.
On the other hand, blind insight communities are useful for gathering unbiased feedback in situations where brand influence could skew results, such as competitive research, brand awareness tracking, or advertising testing. By keeping the sponsor anonymous, these communities allow companies to gather market perceptions from a broad audience, including non-customers and competitor users.
However, blind communities face challenges such as lower engagement, higher participant churn, and increased recruitment costs. Over time, frequent respondents may also start to recognize the brand behind the research, limiting the anonymity that blind studies aim to achieve. For brands looking to reach new audiences without the challenges of maintaining a blind community, alternative like Voice of Market can provide fresh perspectives without sacrificing engagement quality.
What are some best practices for insight community recruitment?
At Rival Tech and Reach3, we advocate for a multi-channel approach when building your insight community. This is because each channel has its own pros and cons. Using different channels can help you go beyond “professional survey takers” and build a more diverse community.
Major ways to recruit your insight community
Established sources:
- Panels
- Email database
Live intercepts
- QR codes
- App-enabled
- Web-embedded
Social sampling
- Organic social media posts
- Paid ads
- Influencers
APIs and web hooks
- Rival Recruitment APIs
What are some best practices when authoring surveys for my community?
This might be hard to hear, but….people don’t like boring surveys. So when thinking of activities for your insight community, we recommend a conversational approach.
Essentially this means creating a research experience that mimics today’s chat culture—one that aligns with how real people actually talk to each other today.
Here are some common best practices when writing conversational surveys:
- Use a natural, human tone. Write like you’re speaking to the person directly. Avoid formal language or jargon. (Hint: AI market research tools can help you optimize your tone!)
- Keep your sentences short and easy to understand.
- Respond appropriately. For example, some platforms like Rival allow you to add “message cards” that let you pre-program appropriate responses.
- Use GIFs, memes and emojis, if they align with your brand voice.
- Avoid long surveys. Respect people’s time by keeping your activities short and enjoyable.
What are some best practices when distributing my community activities?
The key to optimizing distribution is to reach the right people at the right time with the right activity. Top insight community platforms like Rival offer many features that can help you achieve this.
For example, dynamic profiling can help you build members’ profiles over time so you can gradually get more demographic, behavioral and attitudinal data—helping you become more targeted in your future activities.
Community features like targeting by timezone can help boost response rates and engagement.
Most importantly, consider using a research platform that is SMS-based and mobile-first. Because most people today have their phones with them all the time, SMS distribution and mobile-first surveys are perfect for in-the-moment research.
What are some best practices for insight community management?
When it comes to managing your insight community, there’s one golden rule: prioritize the participant experience. Happy, engaged members mean better insights—so let’s make it easy for them to stick around and share their thoughts.
Here’s how to keep your community buzzing:
- Make it effortless.
The last thing your members want is another password to remember or a clunky portal to navigate. Ditch the friction. Keep the experience seamless—no hoops to jump through, just straightforward participation. The easier it is, the more they’ll engage.
- Think mobile-first.
Modern life happens on the go, and your community interactions should too. SMS prompts? Total game-changer. They get fast responses—we’re talking up to 40% of replies within the first hour.
Plus, mobile-friendly surveys make it super simple for participants to snap photos, record videos, and share feedback from anywhere.
- Keep surveys conversational.
Nobody likes robotic surveys. Use AI to tweak your survey questions so they sound more natural and aligned with your brand’s voice. And skip those repetitive questions—profile variables can handle the basics so your members aren’t answering the same thing over and over. Quick, relevant surveys keep them coming back.
- Offer incentives.
Let’s face it—people love a little reward. Whether it’s a chance to win a gift card or exclusive access to an event, small perks go a long way in boosting engagement. It’s a simple, proven strategy: incentives work because they’re, well, incentivizing.
- Share the impact.
Don’t leave your members wondering what happens to their feedback. Show them how their input is making a difference. And keep it simple—a quick, 2-minute video from a team member can be far more effective than a lengthy newsletter. Even better, drop those updates at the start of a survey to grab their attention.
Bonus Tip: Tap into your customer success team.
These folks are a treasure trove of ideas. Regularly check in with them for fresh strategies to keep your community thriving and engagement rates high. Whether it's doing a refresh recruit or getting help to manage incentives, your customer success manager is your secret weapon for maximizing your community’s potential.
Curious how your insight community compares to other communities?
Check out the benchmarks below from our research-on-research involving insight communities that run on the Rival platform.
Remember, your community will thrive and you will get higher quality insights when participants feel valued, heard, and connected. Follow insight community management best practices to keep your community members' experience top-notch so you can reap the rewards of deeper, more meaningful insights.
What are some best practices for analysis and storytelling?
Got data? Great—now it’s time to turn that data into a story that drives impact.
Here’s how to make your insights more compelling and actionable:
- Start by finding the story in your data.
Numbers tell part of the tale, but combining quantitative data with qualitative and video feedback gives you the full picture—context, nuance, and emotion. Top insight community platforms make this easy, blending these methods seamlessly for both participants and researchers. No clunky transitions, just smooth storytelling.
- Lean on powerful analysis tools.
A solid set of analysis and reporting features is your best friend here. Think crosstabs, significant testing, real-time sentiment analysis, and AI-driven theme generation—all in one place. And don’t underestimate the power of a topline report. Quick, shareable insights keep stakeholders looped in and engaged.
- Focus on information hierarchy.
As storytelling expert Jason Cook (formerly of Dell Technologies) points out, your goal is to go beyond presenting data—you’re delivering wisdom. Structure your insights in a way that guides your audience from the big picture down to the details. Prioritize what’s essential and build from there.
- Make your presentations pop.
Modern storytelling techniques are key to grabbing attention and keeping it. Reach3 Insights, for example, uses interactive mobile deliverables that make insights engaging and easy to digest. Want to take it up a notch? Incorporate video feedback from participants. Seeing and hearing real customers adds authenticity and emotional weight to your story—something numbers alone can’t achieve.
Bonus tip: Make sure you deliver your report on time. A late story is often ignored by stakeholders and decision-makers. Use tools like Rival that help accelerate speed to insights.
Bottom line: Data is great, but a story moves people. Using the right storytelling techniques can elevate your insight community's impact as well as your own!
AI tools for communities
When it comes to using AI market research tools to complement your insight community, keep this principle in mind: quality in, quality out. Thankfully conversational research can help: it makes it easy to capture deeper, more authentic insights—insights that you can feed AI.
Here are some examples of AI capabilities that work with a Rival community.
Smart Survey Design
- AI-suggested conversational language that matches your brand voice and tone
- Instant survey creation from your prompts or documents
Deeper Insights, Less Work
- Real-time follow-up questions using AI probing to dig deeper
- Thoughtfulness Scoring that help trigger questions only when needed
- AI Summarizer that generates quick insights from open-ends and video responses
Video Made Simple
- Auto-transcribe, analyze and clop compelling highlight reels
- Surface key themes instantly to support effective storytelling
Insight Community Case Studies and Examples
Insight communities today are used in a wide variety of industries: from consumer goods to high tech, from financial services and health care.
If you're curious how insights teams use communities and research panels, these case studies and examples from Rival Technologies and Reach3 customers are a good start:
Warner Bros. Discovery uses Rival to engage Gen Zs and conduct all types of research, including concept testing, UX research and more.
ŌURA launched a community to drive member-centric decisions on product and marketing.
Time Out leverages research from their community to help partners quantify and prove the impact of their campaigns.
Carnival Corporation uses their insight community to complement other programs like Voice of Player and get insights that improve the guest experience.
McCormick engages with thousands of flavor enthusiasts in different markets using their global insight community.
John Deere updated its approach to communities to keep up with consumer expectations.
REVOLT TV engages with young Black audiences to help partners connect more meaningfully, get real-time insights from events, and build thought leadership.
Brunswick uses APIs and action-triggered insights to get accurate, real-time feedback from boaters.
