Value in a Sense of Community
A market research online community is a great place to source your best ideas and insights, and at the same time, offer a lot of different ways on supporting your organization. Most companies today excel at getting people to participate in their community and grow their member base. However, the potential of getting the most value out of their community and delivering the most value to their members is something they can improve on. So the big question or challenge here is – how do we make sure you're getting the most value from our community, at the same time, deliver the most value to our community?
Measuring, identifying, and making sure you’re getting that value can be extremely challenging but learning and understanding different aspects of the psychology of members is essential. In this matter, the theory of sense of community is really useful to know.
The theory mainly outlines the tremendous feeling of being part of a group, which leads to self-investment in the community. It serves as a foundation to plan and develop ways on how you can meet goals to strengthen and preserving your community through building a system to increase the sense of community your members feels and how much of this feeling your organization gives out. Communities organize around needs and how these can be met. With a strongly designed system that identifies means to reinforce behaviors leading to the development of a sense of community, whereby members’ needs are met by being part of the group – they tend to stick around for longer, participate more, and help each other out just as they enjoy being helped. Successful communities include relationships that are mutually rewarding for everyone. It is clear that a sense of community is a powerful force and having that shared emotional connection between your organization and community will be a silver bullet for your work.
There’s a lot of different ways that your research community should be supporting the company and ways the community can support its members. We are confident in helping you learn how to maximize your resources in building successful market research online communities to support multiple areas of your business. If you have a need for an online community, or want to learn more about engaging hard-to-reach groups, contact us.