Research Engagement Platform
A Research Engagement Platform is a tool that helps teams reach out to potential research participants, speeding up the preparation for structured research activities such as surveys, interviews, focus groups, and user testing. Such tools typically alow teams to collect and manage lists of potential research participants, segment participants by interest, send out invitation e-mails or communicate to groups of potential respondents, and track responses and engagement to inform and facilitate future activities.
Research Engagement Platforms are particularly valuable for organizations looking to conduct qualitative and quantitative research with a focus on specific user segments. A typical example is to send out a Kano Survey to users who voted for a particular proposal on a Community Suggestion Forum, or those interested in related topics.
Many platforms offer features to engage and retain participants, such as personalized invitations, reminder notifications, and incentive management. This helps maintain participant motivation and ensures high-quality responses and continued participation throughout the study.
When to use a research engagement platform?
Research engagement platforms provide a relatively cheap and effective middle-ground between using generic broad audience tools (such as Amazon Mechanical Turk) and hiring a traditional research agency to provide an audience.
Unlike broad audience tools, Research Engagement Platforms allow for the precise selection of participants based on predefined criteria such as demographics, behavior, or user experience. This targeted recruitment ensures that the surveys and questionnaires collect data highly relevant to the research objectives.
Broad audience tools make it easy to get tens of thousands of people to fill in a survey or complete simple tasks, and they can be great for obtaining quick responses at scale when you do not care about the audience demographics. For example, if you want to try out the effects of simple user experience changes in a mobile application with an undifferentiated group. Research Engagement Platforms, in contrast, enable researchers to recruit participants who meet specific criteria, ensuring that the feedback is relevant and meaningful to the study’s objectives.
Participants from broad audience tools are often motivated by financial incentives for completing individual tasks, with little engagement beyond that. Research Engagement Platforms can help to build a relationship with participants, using ongoing studies and feedback loops, making them more suitable for longitudinal studies or detailed user research.
Hiring a traditional research agency can provide an even more specialized audience than with a Research Engagement Platform, but it comes with potentially longer lead times and usually with a much higher price.
Research agencies provide tailored, end-to-end research solutions and often bring a high level of expertise and experience. They handle everything from participant recruitment to data analysis and reporting. However, they can be costly and may not offer the same level of flexibility and control. With a Research Engagement Platforms, the researchers can directly manage and adjust studies in real-time.
Research agencies typically have longer lead times and are less flexible when it comes to rapid iteration or scaling studies. In contrast, Research Engagement Platforms allow for faster engagement in research activities and immediate access to data and results, making them more suitable for companies that need to frequently run research activities.