Our communities247 Platform is a cost effective way to interact with your customers, prospects and key influencers, to conduct research and build brand advocacy with an engaged audience.
The communities247 platform is available as a SaaS (Software as a Service) to marketing research, advertising and (social) media agencies as well as to end users i.e. brand owners and advertisers.
On request, DigitalMR can provide a full or partial service in terms of creating and managing an online community for insights, co-creation and advocacy, be it branded or blind as to who the sponsor is.
| communities247 Features | Software as a Service | Full Service |
|---|
| Administration rights* |
✔ |
X |
| Moderator/Facilitator rights* |
✔ |
X |
| Member access rights |
✔ |
✔ |
| boards247 |
✔ |
✔ |
| diary247 |
✔ |
✔ |
| chat247 |
✔ |
✔ |
| poll247 |
✔ |
✔ |
| IDI247 |
✔ |
✔ |
| Android mobile App |
✔ |
✔ |
| Web responsive layout |
✔ |
✔ |
| Online Surveys |
✔ |
✔ |
| Export of Data/Image/Clips |
✔ |
✔ |
| Member Notifications |
✔ |
✔ |
| Reward Point System |
✔ |
✔ |
| Full White Label** |
✔ |
X |
| Theme Customisation*** |
✔ |
✔ |
| Layout Customisation |
✔ |
✔ |
| Member Recruitment |
X |
✔ |
| Member Incentive Handling |
X |
✔ |
| Community Facilitator |
X |
✔ |
| Discussion Guide Preparation |
X |
✔ |
| Group Moderating |
X |
✔ |
| Report Writing |
X |
✔ |
| Presentation of Insights |
X |
✔ |
| Survey Scripting |
X |
✔ |
| Brand Ambassador Programme |
X |
✔ |
*Admin/Moderator/Facilitator rights: in the full service solution, these functions are fulfilled by DigitalMR
**Full White Label: includes a custom domain. It does not apply for full service since DigitalMR will be providing a service so its brand will be exposed to the client.
*** Theme customisation means: custom logos, colours, banners for a set layout
Why use an online community?
Communities offer deeper levels of engagement and interaction than online panels. Panels are useful tools for conducting regular standard surveys: you ask the questions and panellists provide responses in a fairly structured way.
However, through utilising social media research techniques, communities allow you to go much further. Not only can clients ask their community members questions, but also members can interact with you and among themselves. And communities allow you to do this in a much more flexible way.
You can take advantage of a range of innovative research techniques – from online bulletin boards enhanced with rich media to chat groups. By overcoming the restrictions posed by more conventional research, communities can get you closer to your customers.
Private Online Communities for co-creation (Click to expand)
A private online community offers you the flexibility to ask the questions you want, when you want, to an audience that’s switched on to your brand. It allows you to ask questions in new and engaging ways which provide you with more meaningful findings.
An online community is a valuable social media research resource for any marketing department – it can help with creating new products, adding new features to existing products and advertising.
Small in scale (with member numbers in the hundreds as opposed to thousands) the focus is on dialogue and interaction with community members. There are a raft of research tools and techniques that we have developed to help you interact with the community, and get you closer to your customers:
- Online bulletin boards/forums
- Video/photo diaries
- Online focus groups
- Online in-depth interviews
- Rapid Polling
- Evaluation of visuals
- Video clip evaluation
Private Online Community Panels for large scale research and branding (Click to expand)
With larger scale communities you get the best of both worlds: all the advantages of a community platform for increased dialogue and interaction with members, plus the ability to run larger sample quantitative surveys and marketing campaigns among your community group.
As the name suggests quant panels are large scale communities – usually with many thousands of members. This enables you to segment your research among target groups and conduct full scale quantitative research.
Because of the size of the community it also presents an ideal platform for communicating marketing messages and develop advocacy among customers and key influencers.
In addition to all the functionality of smaller communities you can also break out sub-sets of audience for different purposes such as:
- Identifying trends
- Dialoguing with non clients
- Early adopters
Other Benefits of the Online Community Approach (Click to expand)
- You only pay for sample once when you recruit the community members for the first time and then you can use them as many times as you want for as long as they remain members.
- You can utilise the community for qualitative research, quantitative surveys and for listening to unstructured conversations.
- You can get results faster and cheaper.
- You may use the community for marketing and for R&D in addition to market research
How can DigitalMR help?
DigitalMR are experts in creating online communities for market research and marketing applications. We can develop communities with a focus on discussion and co-creation for your brand, and depending on your requirements, we can scale-up the community to conduct robust quantitative research and broader marketing activity.
