Written by: Marcia DaCosta and Megan McDowell
Requests to create online profiles are increasingly prevalent; think of the number of accounts you have across the internet that require you to fill in information about yourself. Most online communities are set up to do the same and require users to fill out a profile survey that will be attached to the users account information.
These profile surveys are so important for many measures of panel health and are utilized more commonly than other information gathering surveys to help target the subsequent activities in the community. Profile surveys help to:
measure the number of different segments and demographics in your community (for example, making sure remote regions are represented, or making sure there are representative numbers across age groups, etc);
target activities by user information (for example, sending a survey to males between the ages of 25-50 in a certain region);
determine which groups are over- or under-represented (females are more likely to join certain types of online groups or communities, and certain age groups are likely to be over-represented as well);
determine the necessary recruitment strategies to maintain representative proportions of demographics (ex. age distribution in your online community that matches the age distribution of the general public, or your consumer base) to keep results representative.
Given how integral the profile survey is to the panel health and success of your online community, it is important that users keep this information updated. It does not suffice to create a profile survey and then never ask community members to update this information. People move, people get married and divorced, people move through age brackets as time progresses, and so on. Since the profile survey is relied on so heavily, it is important for the success of your platform that all of this information is up to date.
We recommend scheduling a regular reminder for community members to update their profile information. This could be every six months, or yearly. Although this shouldn’t be too often, its regular occurrence is very important.
If you would like to learn more about profile surveys, how you can use them, and other features of our software, contact us! We would be happy to walk you through how an online community can help you with your engagement needs.