The best way for you to get research when you need it, is to have a panel bursting full of beautiful humans to call upon when you need them. Having your own panel doesn't need to be complex or cost a fortune. But it needs to have some basics.
These are the main ways you can recruit people to participate in user research or studies:
- recruiting participants yourself
- recruiting participants through a market or research company, or research platform
Minimise how often you recruit the same person. It's best practice to conduct research with new people for each research project to make sure you're covering a diverse range of needs. A general principle for quantitative research activities (for example, high volume surveys) is to only research with the same person every six months.
It might be appropriate to recruit participants directly where:
- funding for recruitment is limited
- your organisation is connected to networks of people who fit your target cohort
- your organisation doesn't have a participant panel or central research function for you to leverage
- your organisation has memorandum of understanding (MOU) set up with other organisations to help facilitate recruitment or identifying people for research
- you have existing relationships with peak bodies or not-for-profit organisations that can connect you to people
Consider whether you can leverage customer databases maintained in your organisation where customers have consented to being contacted about future research opportunities. Or, if your organisation runs Customer Satisfaction Surveys you can start collecting data from people about whether they consent to being contacted for research or usability testing.
It’s easy to think the hard part is over once you’ve set it up, but like all business tasks, this one comes with admin too.
1. Decide on how often you’re going to update your database with users who have signed up
2. Decide on when you will contact your participants after sign up, we would suggest within 24
hours of getting them to complete the detailed screener. This is what you will use to filter them before contacting them about further research.
3. Decide on who has access to the participant data, you will most likely have this in your privacy policy. However, if you don’t, don’t panic. Just keep access to the bare minimum. Think Excel or GoogleSheet in a restricted folder.
Everywhere… joking, don't do that! But you do want to make sure it’s reaching users at peak moments
Add it to your website or services. This is usually at the end of a transaction like sending an invite to contributors or completing a project. Want some help or examples on how to do this? Just ask and we will add it next month!
Emails that go out to users. Someone has reported a bug to you, add a line into the response asking them to sign up to your panel. They have already shown that they are keen to support the service.
Social media platforms. Just solved a problem or teasing a new feature release? Add the link on the end of your posts and promote any incentives to increase sign up
Groups and communities. You might be part of one or you might know someone who is. Find out who owns the group and ask them if they can post a link on your behalf. Think about how you can contribute your time to the community or group as a thanks e.g. hosting a talk, writing a post or blog or even discounted products to their community for the month
That’s quite a bit to manage. There's other ideas for us to try, but let’s try the simple approach first. Depending on how much interaction you receive will depend on how we grow the panel sustainably.
When you're ready start to think about how you can write recruitment briefs to make the best use of your panl.
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