DIY vs. full-service insight communities: 9 things insight leaders should consider 

This article is part of a year-long, 25th anniversary series that explores where insight communities have been, where they are today, and the market and customer trends that are shaping where C Space is taking insight communities next.

You’ve concluded that an insight community is an essential component of your 2025 strategy. Great decision! Insight communities deliver immense value by putting the customer at the heart of your business to drive the right strategic initiatives. But if you’re considering a DIY approach to save on cost, it’s worth asking: Are you set up to fully optimize your investment?

As the originators and long-time leaders of insight communities, here are some things to keep in mind.

Building a high-performing insight community that is going to serve as a rich, ongoing source of customer insights that serve many needs isn’t plug-and-play. From building consensus with disparate stakeholder teams over community member specifications to community member sourcing decisions (i.e., will you use a customer list or recruit from research panels or specialty providers?) to workflows and content generation, to shepherding the process from kickoff to live in the field, there’s a lot to accomplish — especially if you want to move fast.

Have a team that is ready to manage the complexity of launching an insight community smoothly and efficiently.

Did you know that over 30% of panel samples may be compromised? This means that no matter how sophisticated your panel or CRM technology, bad actors, bots, fraudulent or ineligible respondents may make their way into your community. And that doesn’t even account for poor quality respondents or those who are there to make a quick buck and don’t engage meaningfully with your research. Managing quality takes daily human moderation and oversight to find the bad responses before they cloud the final findings.

Assign a team member to evaluate responses with community-integrated AI tools and work closely with sample partners to ensure you’re maintaining data integrity.

Getting to real insight in a community requires building trust with members — trust that the community is legitimate, that their fellow members are real, that their responses are seen and heard, that their voices matter. If members believe that the community experience is unidirectional, that it’s take, take, take from a brand or that they are screaming into the void, they will drop out. This rapidly leads to plummeting response rates lower than 20%. Building trust requires ongoing moderation, closing the loop periodically to tell community members how their insights have made a difference, and daily crisis or complaint management. If their experience is poor, it can cast a pall over your brand.

Carve out time to ensure community engagement. Manage community member questions, resolve issues and, most importantly, facilitate the conversational, two-way street that builds a trusted relationship between your members and your brand or industry.

According to research done by organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich, while 95% of people think they are self-aware, only 10-15% actually are. What this means in market research terms is if you only ask people “why” in the context of a survey, you only get 10% of the way there. Getting to meaningful insight for your organization goes beyond the simple “why” question. It requires creative questioning, leveraging interactive tools and diverse methodologies that activate the left and right brain of community members. This opens up discursive space for both introverts and extroverts, giving verbal, auditory, spatial, kinesthetic and logical thinkers a way to offer their thoughts and ideas in ways that best suit their intelligence. (See Gardner, Multiple Intelligence Theory.)

Have a plan for how to translate community research briefs into multifaceted and creative questions that get members to engage and share the sorts of thoughts, ideas and feelings that lead to transformational customer insight.

Getting to real insight in a community requires building trust with members — trust that the community is legitimate, that their fellow members are real, that their responses are seen and heard, that their voices matter .

The best insight community platforms are optimized for mobile devices, allowing brands to connect to customers where they are. A great platform will also enable you to tailor your research to ask questions specific to particular segments and demographics, so your research is not unilateral. But is your research study itself equally as optimized? Identify team members with the skill and creativity to draft questions that work for multi-tasking people who are stopping into the community between TikToks and Instas, using methodologies that create a social media-like experience.

Leverage the device that many people can’t live without to get them talking aloud, bringing you into their lives, taking you along on their daily tasks.

Once your insight community is up and running, demand builds fast throughout the organization. The community can quickly become a catch-all for every question in the business, which is gratifying but hard to manage and prioritize. Often you will be dealing with many different stakeholders who are unfamiliar with community research, and getting the right questions can be time consuming. And let’s talk pipeline: Some weeks you may have upwards of five projects live at one time, with another five in the pipeline. Knowing what stage each project is at can be difficult. And you can’t wait for a weekly team meeting just to have a Gantt chart updated, you need to know when your stakeholder asks you.

Make a clear plan for workflow, project management, real-time tracking, prioritization, demand generation and fulfillment for effective online community management.

It is true that social glue and a positive experience where community members feel heard and have an impact on a brand/industry they care about (see point 2) are the core reasons members stick around in a community. With that said, they also appreciate—and deserve—to be rewarded financially for their time.

Allocate the appropriate reward for the length and demand of the research ask.

One of the core value propositions of an insight community is that it is always on, and members are on demand to your organization 24/7. Your stakeholders will come to love that, especially the C-suite.

Prepare your team to drop other priorities at a moment’s notice to draft, program, field, incentivize, moderate and analyze those urgent, high impact requests — without sacrificing quality.

A robust, vibrant insight community results in member-generated discussions where you often discover unmet needs, white space opportunities and consumer-led innovation. But this requires daily moderation to catch those game-changing, ahead-of-trend aha’s as they emerge. Spotting these trends requires sharp human judgment alongside AI tools, and while the tools themselves are fantastic for identifying dominant narratives and illuminating differences between segments and demographics, your high-impact insights are often found in the outliers, the odd comment or video, those couple of people saying “purple” while the rest debate black and white. It takes a keen researcher and human eye to uncover those nuanced insights.

Dedicate a team to daily moderation and have AI tools and dashboards at hand to mine your immense, ongoing log of community member conversation for those golden nuggets.

Everything we’ve discussed above has a cost … time, energy, focus and money. You must factor in member management, engagement, incentivization, research design, demand management and translation of customer “aha’s” into stories for your stakeholders that transform your business

Ask yourself how much you are “saving” by doing it yourself. Or maybe more aptly put, what might you be sacrificing to go it alone?

DIY can work, but it requires significant planning, expertise and resources to succeed. If you’re unsure about handling it all alone, C Space can help. Whether you need support with a few tasks or want end-to-end management, we’ve got an insight community model to fit your needs.

Ready to learn more? Let’s talk.