Insight Communities run by several different departments and/or in multiple geographic regions require careful planning and consistent communication between project managers. Here we will outline how to create a clearly defined system that will keep your communities organized and efficient.
Organizational Tools
Planning Tools: A central place to document activities and sharebacks for is essential to ensure that members are being engaged in a thoughtful and cohesive manner. A shared document and/or calendar (Google Doc, Intranet, etc.) will help others in the organization understand what is being planned and when communications (invitations, reminders, hub newsletters, etc.) will be deployed.
Hierarchy: We recommended assigning a single point of contact for each community (or in each region) responsible for ensuring that all platform users are logging their community activities into the shared document/calendar. He/she is also responsible for prioritizing activities.
Team Updates: Regular meetings between community managers is highly recommended. Meetings should be used to inform the team of upcoming activities and sharebacks, the community members who will be communicated with, and the priority of the projects. These meetings compliment the shared document/calendar, and will aid the single point of contact to prioritize conflicts while keeping the member experience in mind.
Technical Details
Activities and Reports: Have a consistent internal naming convention for all Activities and Reports. This should incorporate the communities, departments, and activity itself. For example, if you have communities for Brand A and Brand B, accessed by Sales and Marketing, in the US, UK and China, the naming convention could be:
- BrandB001 - SA020 - UK - Ladies Swimwear Study
- (Brand – Department – Region – Topic)
Question Names: A consistent method for question names should also be implemented. For example, screener questions could be denoted with the letter S, with the main questions of the activity questions denoted with the letter Q. This enables a faster and more efficient search capability to identify questions that have been used before. Ex: S4_Employment, Q1_Agreement_Scale.
Profile Variables: A consistent manner should be used to avoid confusion and for ease of reporting and analysis. For example, add _US _UK or _CN to the end of your profile variables to denote the region, or if the same PV is used by all, add _GLOBAL. Examples:
- S4_Employment _US
- Q9_Age_GLOBAL
Imports: While it is recommended that external data be imported through an API, if a manual import of external data is required, this should be regulated by the single point of contact for the community to ensure that no duplicate Profile Variables are created. See here for more information on manual imports.
