Activity Types

The icanmakeitbetter community platform offers five different activity types for research and engagement initiatives:

1. Surveys
2. Focus Groups
3. Ideation Sessions
4. Live Chats
5. Journals

Outlined below are high level functionality, application and best practice for each activity type. For more details, read specific articles within each activity section.

Surveys:

Surveys are the most commonly used activity type and offer users a lot of flexibility in terms of design and application. They are comparable to traditional online surveys. They use closed-ended and open-ended question types, can be short, quick-poll type questions or longer 10-15 minute surveys. Sample sizes can range from as few as ten to hundreds of community members depending on your objectives.

Surveys are a great tool if you want some quick quantitative insights. This activity type is also useful for short surveys that are aimed at getting more qualitative input from members without allowing for member interaction. 

For more details on Surveys, read here. 

Focus Groups:

icanmakeitbetter focus groups are a little different from typical online focus groups. This activity type is typically held over 3-5 days and is similar to an online bulletin board. Focus groups include all question types offered on the icanmakeitbetter platform. Sessions can include as few or as many respondents depending on the research objective.   

Focus Groups on the icanmakeitbetter platform are similar to survey acitivities. The key difference is that community managers can post probing questions, and members are able to read other members' comments and respond to members and the moderator probes in focus group activities.

icanmakeitbetter focus groups offer the benefits of online qualitative research while eliminating some of the drawbacks of focus groups. This is achieved through the following activity design: 

• Each member responds to all open-ended and closed-ended questions in the focus group.
• After respondents answer all questions, they are able to view the verbatim responses of all members in the group. The member can scroll through all questions and post responses to his/her own post, others' posts and moderator probes.

This flow ensures that each respondent provides his/her own answer to open-ended questions before seeing anyone else's, preventing group think. The discussion section which follows allows for in-depth discussion among members and allows for moderator probing.

For more details on Focus Groups, set up, user experience, moderation, etc., read here. 

Ideation Sessions:

Ideation Sessions are a powerful tool for open innovation and ideation to explore topics and get input and feedback from your members. It is great for objectives such Crowdsource and Co-create. 

It is easy to set up. Simply program a topic or broad question you are ready to launch to your members. Members are able to post ideas, vote, comment and follow others' posts. And, of course, you are able to monitor and moderate the conversation in real-time.

For more details on Ideation Sessions, read here. 

Live Chats:

Another great tool to in-depth qualitative insights are Live Chats. You can capture immediate feedback from members. Identify members you want to talk to, invite those available at the time you want to hold your Live Chat, and program your question. During the Live Chat, have your clients and internal stakeholders observe the session in the client backroom while you moderate the discussion and probe using input from the backroom. 

Live Chats are qualitative research activities and should be conducted with around 10-15 respondents and typically last about 60 minutes. This allows for in-depth discussion and all participants to contribute.

Live chats will include mainly open questions to allow discussion, participant interaction and moderator probing. However, some quantitative, polling-type questions can be used as well. For details on question types available, read here. 

For more details on Live Chats, read here.

Journals:

This activity type allows you to collect deep insights into members' behavior and opinions over time. You can collect any type of data: closed-ended, text, images, video, etc.

Program a set of questions to be answered by respondents on a regular schedule, e.g., daily, weekly, etc. You only need to program your questions once, but are able to get repeat journal answers.

This activity type is especially useful in association with usage tests, shop-alongs, in-home ethnography, diaries, trackers and more. For example, imagine you have a product you want your members to try for the next 7 days and want to see how their usage and experience changes over time. Daily journals provide rich data into changes in frequency of use, length of use each time used, ease and satisfaction of use.