'Onboarding' For Better Online Research Communities

When running a pop-up research community, you’ll want to get members online and acclimatised as quickly as possible before progressing with the research agenda. At Further we refer to this as ‘Onboarding’.

Onboarding is essential to help participants get to know each-other and feel comfortable expressing themselves in the community environment. It’s an essential aspect of every community and will help you to establish rapport and deliver better quality insight!

Once you have issued members invitation emails, they will need to activate their accounts, answer profiling questions, digest your welcome message, and familiarise themselves with the community environment. That way they’ll be ready to hit the ground running when the first set of research activities arrive.

We recommend allowing at least 48 hours for onboarding before your online research community goes live, although this will depend on when you plan to launch the community, and initial levels of response (e.g. taking email bounce-backs into consideration if recruiting via your database).

We recognise that onboarding can potentially be a large chunk of time, so to help get your project off the ground we’re offering 48 hours of free onboarding support for all of our communities!

What does this mean?

You’re welcome to start onboarding up to 48 hours before the official start date, to allow you further time to progress your research agenda and deliver insight against your objectives.

We highly recommend publishing an ice-breaker activity during the onboarding period. You might want to use this as a warm-up, introduction or tech-check exercise. We’re happy to share suggestions, although the topic is entirely up to you!

To take advantage of free ‘onboarding’, simply let your Account Manager know when you’d like this to start and we’ll take care of the rest when setting up your new project.

For morehelpful tips and advice on participant onboarding and engagement, download our guide here