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Top 8 Questions You Should Be Asking Your Online Community (MROC) Provider

If you are like many brands, a market research online community is an essential part of your customer-closeness mandate, yielding rich, impactful, always-on insights, both qualitative and quantitative. Oftentimes, those communities are annual engagements that come due for renewal in the fall.

In the spirit of renewal season, Jennifer Adams, SVP of Digital Hives and Online Communities at Big Village, a 20 year veteran of the MROC space, has pulled together a precis on the eight essential questions you should be asking of your current community vendor, or any new providers you approach, during the renewal RFP process to ensure you have the best solution in hand.
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Below is the sample of the insights you’ll find in, “Top 8 Questions You Should Be Asking Your Online Community (MROC) Provider.”

How rigorous is your approach to member quality?

Online communities are only as good as the members themselves. You need to know that who you have in your community are real people, not bots or bad actors, exactly who they say they are, are engaged, and provide quality answers that “pass the sniff test” of legitimate responses, not AI-generated ones. What controls does your provider have at every step of the process, from screening to the community technology to human moderation? How experienced is your team in identifying bad actors, bots, duplicative responses, AI responses, poor responses, speeding, and more? Is their process one-time, upon initial recruit, or is it continuous and daily?

At Big Village, we prioritize member quality. We use rigorous technological controls at every phase of the community lifecycle, including using AI and human moderators to verify responses and continuously replace poor or fraudulent members.

How are you using AI?

AI has significant benefits for online communities, which generate 100,000s of unstructured responses. Does your platform have integrated AI tools that generate good summaries that code sentiment? Does it allow you to query the data in real time? Is there someone helping to make that AI work harder for you, taking those AI insights and ensuring they tell a strategic story that answers your objectives?

We white-label a top community platform so we can focus on member quality and service, and we use a portfolio approach to assemble a suite of AI tools to ensure high-quality responses, query unstructured data, code verbatims, and sentiment, and identify emerging insights at speed and scale.

About the Author

Jennifer Adams leads Big Village’s Digital Hives and Online Communities practice where she is responsible for all aspects of our product, services and technology and is involved in consulting and leading the team on all client projects. During her 20 years in the market research online community (MROC) space, she has touched every aspect of online research from engagement design to recruitment, member health and incentivization to creative learning agenda design, live FG/IDI and asynchronous qual facilitation, analysis and strategy- both in the US and internationally. A single mom of twin 5 year old boys, Jennifer also created and runs our syndicated MomLife panel of 2,000+ mothers recruited from our sister company Wild Sky Media’s mommy blogs to participate in research for our clients. Prior to joining Big Village, Jennifer spent 10 years at C-Space, and established their presence in Europe and then in NYC. In her spare time, Jennifer does high intensity interval training, is an aspiring romance novelist and explores advances in managing autoimmune disease. Jennifer holds her Ed.M in Educational Technology and her AB in English Literature and Language, both from Harvard University.

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