Off-Platform Activities

There is a lot you can do on your community, but sometimes you might find you need to go off-platform for some of your research needs. 

Before starting on off-platform activities, talk to your account manager:

• Are there any contractual limitations to how you can use your community members? This usually depends on how your community members were recruited.
• What is the best approach for your research including on-platform vs. off-platform options?
• How should you set up your activities to ensure you can use data across platforms?

Off-Platform Surveys

You can provide external links within a survey to send respondents to another platform (e.g., conjoint study, card sort, etc.). 

If you want to merge that data when done make sure to have users enter their icmib email address as a question on the external platform. Then you can export that data and export the icmib data and merge for your reporting. 

Recruiting members for off-platform qualitative activities

You can easily use your community to select your target respondents and then send out a screener activity.

For example, you could screen members and ask for their participation interest for an in-person focus group. Make sure you filter members for the target demographics and area you want before inviting.

Or you may want to do iHUTs. You can filter your members and screen them on the platform, mail out the products and then gather feedback after the usage test on the community platform using any appropriate activity types. 

This is a great way to leverage your community investment as it saves time and costs for in-person research.