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Lesson
1

Overview of Panel Building

3 mins to complete

Welcome to Building a Participant Panel, the final course in our 3-part onboarding series for Research Hub admins. 

As your research practice scales, a participant panel like Research Hub can mean the difference between a chaotic, time-consuming recruitment process and one that’s streamlined, professional, and engaging for both researchers and participants. Research Hub’s panel management features help you track, segment, and protect your participant data, while automating all recruitment logistics to ensure a fast, simple recruit for every study—no matter who’s running it. 

In the first lesson of this course, you’ll learn:

  • Why recruiting from a curated, data-rich panel can be more beneficial than recruiting on a project-by-project basis
  • The importance of long-term thinking when building and managing a panel

📹 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!

The value of building a participant panel

Research Hub acts as a single source of truth for all research activity happening at your organization. When all projects are launched, recruited, tracked, and managed in one platform, it offers a better experience for everyone involved:

  • Research leaders have more control over costs, compliance, and communication between researchers and participants. 
  • Researchers save time and energy by accessing a database of already-vetted participants, rather than starting from scratch for each project.
  • Participants get to opt-into research they’re interested in, gain familiarity and trust with your research team, and have a higher chance of being chosen for studies that are relevant to them. 

The importance of long-term thinking when building and managing a panel

As you’re setting up your Hub panel, it’s important to think beyond your current projects toward a more sustainable panel investment as your team and research practice grow. It can be difficult to clean up an unmaintained panel with stale or disorganized data, so the sooner you can start building your panel, the better.

At User Interviews, we use the Research Hub Maturity Map as a framework for understanding and improving your approach to panel management with our product. You can use the Maturity Map to help you visualize your path to panel maturity, whether your organizational needs require you to develop a full, data-enriched panel with advanced governance features or you have everything you need with a less involved curated panel. 

Why opt-in forms are the best way to build your panel

Opt-in forms aren’t the only way to build your panel—you can also add participants to Hub via CSV uploads, data integrations, and more—but they are the best way to fill your panel with engaged, best-fit participants. 

Creating opt-in forms and promoting them through your company’s communication channels allows you to source highly-motivated users and collect relevant data about them. Because these customers have raised their hand to be involved in ongoing research efforts, they often yield higher response rates than other panel building methods. 

Opt-in forms also give you more control over the type of data you collect about participants. By adding custom questions and fields to your opt-in forms, you can quickly and easily collect vital participant information that can be used for segmentation and targeting later on. 

Other methods for adding participants to your panel include:

  • Uploading a CSV file of participants to a project or directly to Hub
  • Manually adding a single participant directly to your panel
  • Sending invitations to a live study—you can choose whether to store sign ups in Hub
  • Feeding live data into your panel with data integrations or the API

Keep learning

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