Online research communities

Virtual Surveys is the UK's leading provider of Research 2.0 solutions, most notably online research communities. These embrace a participatory world and encourage consumer and client collaboration.

Why use online research communities?

Through Virtual Surveys bespoke CustomCommunity™ platform (described below), our clients use online research communities to meet a wide range of objectives, including:

  • Market evaluation
  • Ideation and brainstorming
  • Concept testing
  • New product and service development
  • Website development and usability
  • Communications development and assessment

Our communty solutions can meet a range of long term and short term objectives. Above all, they offer a chance to conduct consumer research in an engaging, collaborative and fun way that delivers great insight at a great price.

V-Community™ - our long term, ongoing community solution

V-Community™ is an evolution of the proprietary or brand panel, where we invite anywhere from 500 to 2,000 participants to become part of a closed, invitation-only group of consumers who interact with Virtual Surveys, the client and each other to produce consumer insight.

An example of a community homepage is shown below - click the image to enlarge it.


V-Discussion screenshot

The key benefit of a V-Community™ is that a group of engaged consumers is continuously available to the client to meet a multitude of their research needs, both qual and quant, quick or slow. As such, they offer significant cost savings over traditional techniques.

V-Discussion™ - our short term community solution

V-Discussion™ projects tend to last anywhere between 1-6 weeks depending on the objectives and have anywhere between 20-100 participants. Clients have full access to the V-Discussion™ community, allowing for customer-agency-client dialogue.

The key benefits of a V-Discussion™ are the cost effective engagement of a relatively large group of people in iterative, fun and considered research.

Virtual Surveys CustomCommunity™ platform

Our bespoke CustomCommunity™ platform is the basis for our V-Community™ and V-Discussion™ projects. It allows participants to create a home page, take part in discussions, blog, review, enter polls, make 'buddies', complete surveys and co-create video clips and other stimuli.

We believe that what sets our CustomCommunity™ platform apart from some other competitor products is that it is purpose built by market researchers, for market research:

  • Combines the strengths of both qualitative and quantitative research
  • Member sign-up profiling feature is fully customisable; we collect relevant data that remains in the platform to enable detailed sub analysis
  • Exciting collaborative tools such as V-Collaboration™ polls (where members can add to the answer list), whiteboard and digital ‘post-it’ notes
  • SMS to blog functionality, for mobile participation
  • No ‘default’ set up; each community is fully tailored
  • Continual development of platform functionality
  • Template design is highly flexible; we can work to brand guidelines
  • Email communications can be fully tailored to meet brand guidelines