Our Blog

Whenever a community is setup there is a reason for it. There is a predefined output that is desired and it has been determined that an online research community is needed to gain that output. It is now up to you to work out how you are going to make your goal a reality.

The traditional way is to break your desired output down into as many tasks as you think you need to reach the your target. Now this is all well and good but what exactly is a task and how exactly do they help you to get where you want to be?

What is a Task?
In very simple terms a task is a question/project/challenge you set your community members to complete.

Building your tasks up and making them interesting, engaging and practical is vital to making sure your community is successful. Tasks represent your interpretation of the client set brief; they are your way of achieving the desired output. Tasks are critical to getting relevant feedback and need to be crafted with care if you are to achieve your community goals.

This is why I believe a task can be anything and everything you want it to be.

Every community is different, therefore, the tasks within that community are going to be different every time. You as community manager in collaboration with your research team need to make the call on how you think your tasks should be planned out and how they appear to your community.

The format of your tasks take depends on a few key factors:

What your community software is capable of

How creative you want to get with your tasks

What you want out of the research

Most community software has basic web 2.0 tools – message boards, diaries, blogs, polls etc and it is really easy as a community manager to let these task formats to take president when writing your task plan.

Hatching Your Plan

If a research community were a body, the task plan would be the brain. Pumping out direction to the community via the community managers (who are the heart of the community, if you were wondering!).

The task plan binds the research and community elements together and sets out exactly what you want to get from the activity. It is the lifeblood of everything you do during the research and if it isn’t properly considered the success of your community will be seriously under threat. Traditionally researchers write the task plan but if you want it to work for a certain community it should be written with the input from community managers.

A task plan consists of a set of tasks that you are going to ask your community members to complete. A good task plan will make it clear to the users what they are being asked to achieve and it gives the community managers guidelines of what they need to gain from the research as a whole and each task individually.

As we have already stated your tasks, and therefore your task plan, are going to be different every time but there are certain things you will need to consider every time you begin thinking about a new task plan:

Who are your users? Where are they from, how creative/tech savvy are they? What do you think they will and won’t react to?

What output do you need from this community and the tasks individually, how are you going to get what you want?

How can you make the tasks flow as a journey that the users are a part of, how can you make what you’re doing exciting for them?

Do not funnel users answers before they have even begun to complete your tasks, it is easy to steer and guide users subconsciously. By all means give them examples of how you would like them to answer but stay neutral.

What can you do to stimulate your community members, too many words = boring, how can you liven up the tasks with visuals?

It is really important that you and the approach you want to take is enforced on the tasks you want users to complete. Your creativity and vision should be driving force behind the task plan, not the task formats.

Don’t Pigeon Hole Yourself

A lot of the time creativity and creative thinking can get lost as you are too busy trying to pigeon hole your tasks into a certain format. It is the ultimate sin as a task writer to start off by setting out how many of a certain task format they want to have in a research community.

To really achieve your output you need to build your tasks freely and without the constraint of different formats.

Write your tasks first and then when completed to the standard you want, apply the suited format. Things like message boards, blogs, diaries etc are very open and adaptable, you should use them to fit around your tasks not the other way round.

Moderate Everything

As a community manager you are the closest point of contact to the community. You are closer to it than research teams, clients, stakeholders and the community users themselves! You know what is good for the community and what is not, you know what they will react to and what they won’t; this is why you have to be a moderator of tasks and content as well as users.

If you do not think a task is right for the community let the research team know, and give them advice on how to adapt/change it to make it appropriate for your users. Do not be afraid to let researchers know if you think something needs to be tweaked, they will be happy for the input, as it is their results that are being enhanced.

The role of researchers, community managers, clients and users is something I am going to explore in my next blog:

Writing Tasks for Research Communities –  The Role of Everybody

Coming Soon!

Over the coming months we are going to be taking an indepth look at the world of research communities and what lies behind them. Every week we’ll be touching on a new subject, topics will range from management to task conception, online creativity to relationships. Ultimately we are hoping to produce an in-depth, robust and infomative guide to online research commnunities; Face’s very own Community Management 101.

With online communities becoming increasingly popular in research circles and brands continuing to transfer their qualitative work online, the role of research communities, community managers and research teams is evolving.

As community functionality grows and new tools become available it’s very easy for clients and research teams to get carried away and throw everything at communities using all tools to the max, just because they can.

In this series of blogs we are going to explore the best routes for community managers and research teams to effectively use online community tools and create an interesting environment in which users can complete research tasks without pressure, tedium or stress.

And it is this I am going to start with, the environment; the website; the research tool; and whether you can actually, credibly, call it a community.

Are Research Communities Really Communities?

Research communities have always come under criticism for using the term ‘community’. Some people see them as forced gatherings using a research tool, rather than true natural communities and are therefore undeserving of the name. Some of the arguments against research ‘communities’ include:

• They are not organic
• People are usually incentivized to participate
• It is not a part of users natural internet journey
• They have start and end dates
• The community disappears when the project ends

To a certain extent I can understand these criticisms as, from an outside point of view, research communities must seem like a load of panel girls and boys being put on a website and told to complete tasks for a certain period of time.

However, I am a believer that at the core of every community there has to be a common goal, interest and/or belief, something that inherently binds the people within together. It is for this reason that I believe that research ‘communities’ can actually exist, rather than just being a couple of words shoved together to make a cool sounding buzzphrase.

It’s a fine line between research community and a website where research takes place. There are a couple of things you must do at the start of a project to ensure you start user engagement and interaction early.

Creating Your Community

If you bring together a group of people for a research project they automatically have unspoken commonalities before the activity begins. Usually in research projects people are recruited as they share similar demographics, opinions or personality traits. These instant similarities are one of the two main things you need to rely on to begin the transition from research project to research community.

The other reliance is you, the community manager, it’s your job to take the lead and encourage community behaviour. Initially by stating the commonalities between users and encouraging them to interact through tasks based around similarities.

It is these early tasks, and their wording, that will ultimately determine whether you are the facilitator of an online tool or the manager of an online community.

The wording and crafting of tasks is the most important thing when running a community as it not only ascertains your research outputs but also determines how your users will engage and for how long. Being able to create research tasks that are fun and exciting is a vital skill when running a community and it is this skill that I will begin to explore in my next post:

Writing Tasks for Research Communities – Part 2: What is a Task?

Coming Soon!