Lesson
7

Looking Ahead: Intro to Panel Building

6 mins to complete

This initial onboarding course has been designed to get you up and running as seamlessly as possible. By now, you should have all the basic team settings configured and the ability to launch and manage projects on your own. 

As you get deeper into your engagement with Research Hub, panel building is going to become an important part of your research strategy. You don’t have to get started right away, but in this last lesson of our Hub for ReOps: Set Up and Onboarding course, we’ll provide you with some context and introductory tips to help set you up for success later on, including:

  • Common challenges teams face when building and maintaining a panel 
  • Tips and considerations for when you move onto building a best-in-class research CRM

We’ll discuss all of this in more detail in a future course on Panel Building. Sign up to be notified when new Academy Courses drop. 

📹 Prefer watching to reading? This content is available as both an article and a video. Watch our Customer Success Specialist, Kaylynn, take you through the content in the video below or keep reading to dive in!

Tips and considerations for when you move onto building a best-in-class research CRM

As you’re planning your shift from project-by-project recruitment to recruitment from a curated, data-rich panel, some important things to note include:

1. Think carefully about what kind of data you want to collect in your Hub panel. 

Hub’s custom data fields help you create a tailored dataset to support the specific research needs of your team, but that flexibility can also lead to data bloat if you’re not intentional about which fields you include. Consider which fields—e.g. products purchased, customer persona, etc.—would be most useful to the people doing research at your org, and create guidelines or templates for CSV uploads. 

For an example, try using our sample CSV file as a template.

2. Opt-in forms are the best way to build an engaged, organized panel. 

Opt-in forms are the ideal panel building strategy, because they allow you to build a list of engaged, enthusiastic participants while quickly collecting all the information you need in your Hub database. See User Interviews’s opt-in form for an example of what this might look like.

3. The hardest part about using opt-in forms is distributing them. 

Share links to your opt-in form via in-app intercepts, customer newsletters, or other trusted channels to avoid fraud and ensure the right folks are targeted. 

4. Use filters, segments, and labels to organize the panel. 

Filters, dynamic segments, and labels are all great tools to help your team navigate your Hub panel with ease. Make sure to educate your team on what segments and filters exist, and how to use these to target the right users. 

5. Use bulk emails to keep your panelists engaged. 

Bulk emails allow you to contact your participants outside of the context of studies. Take full advantage of this feature to send out product news or welcome emails, ask them to update their information using our opt-in form, and follow up with your panel to let them know what’s coming soon and keep them excited about participating in research. 

6. Automate data maintenance with our native integrations and API. 

Cleaning and updating your data can become extremely time-consuming if you’re trying to manage it all through manual tactics. If your team doesn’t have the capacity to regularly screen, edit, and update your participant data, you can automate this process using our Hub API and native data integrations.

Common challenges teams face when building and maintaining a panel 

When you make the shift from recruiting participants on a project-by-project basis to recruiting from a curated participant CRM, you may experience some challenges, such as: 

  • Aligning your team on panel strategy: Depending on your team structure, you may need to collaborate with multiple internal teams and stakeholders. In the beginning, it’s likely that you’ll need to juggle differing opinions on panel strategy, including what data to upload, which invite rules to use, and more. The best way to overcome this challenge is to loop stakeholders in as early as possible for level-setting conversations. 
  • Keeping your data clean: Cleaning and updating participant data can become a real challenge as your panel grows. To circumvent this issue, it helps to have a controlled, proactive approach to managing data uploads—such as assigning one panel manager who oversees all uploads—as well as strategies or tools for updating your panel over time. Our API and integrations are a great way to automate data upkeep, but you can also periodically send out opt-in forms to confirm data with participants. 
  • Enabling your team to use the panel: As we mentioned in the previous lesson, training your team is one of the most important steps in a successful rollout. When other team members begin recruiting from your panel, they may struggle to adjust to the shift from project-by-project workflow recruitment. Creating strong enablement materials and making time for group or individual training will all help here as well. And as always, don’t be afraid to reach out to your UI CSM for guidance in this area. 

It’s important to make note of these potential challenges and work with your CSM to navigate them successfully. But you don’t have to jump into it all right now—we’ll dive deeper into panel activation in a future course.

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