We live in a world where we are constantly being asked to answer surveys and polls. Whether it's for charitable reasons, new product ideas, or even political candidates, the survey is a staple of modern life.
They can be a good source of feedback if you're looking for opinions from your customers or other stakeholders, but they also have serious limitations that you must take into consideration when using them as part of your idea gathering strategy. The most common limitations are:
- Limited probing through multiple choice questions means you only get answers to what you ask, missing out on a lot of other ideas from your community
- One-to-many structure of these research types means you get no collaborative feedback or changing of minds among your consumer base
- Pre-set questionnaires mean you can’t follow-up with further questions to get to the bottom of ‘the why’
So if you want to keep an open mind for unrestricted suggestions from your community, who engage because of the conversation, not because they feel obligated to, read below!
How can you gather ideas on Multytude?
1. Create a room for your idea gathering session
Just tap the 'Start new conversation' button on the Multytude homepage, and enter the title. It could be as specific a question as 'what should be the name of our next non-dairy cream?' or a broad one 'what drives you to buy sustainable products?' depending on what insight you’re after. Describe what you mean in detail and provide a prompt or two in the Description section to get your community thinking.
You can add links to external content using 'evidence links' for them to check before they respond too. These could be videos you want them to comment on or anything else to support your research.
2. Decide whether you want to partner with a creator
Partnering with a creator or an influencer to host this conversation may be a good idea for a more 'authentic' conversation. As long as the creator’s audience matches your target community, it would make sense for the creator to host the conversation for you.
Besides providing access to a wider group of your target audience, the creator can enhance the reach of your research study and incentivise the audience to bring their best ideas to the conversation. At the end of the day, being praised by their favourite creator for their unique idea would mean the world.
3. Decide who should be invited to this room
If you want to simply announce this conversation on your social channels and invite anyone who follows you, it's totally fine. Alternatively, you can create a private conversation and only provide the link to pre-selected participants for them to access. If you need help with defining the profile of your participants, do email us to help you with audience segmentation.
4. Swipe through the ideas and keep your participants engaged
This is the fun part! You can now sit back and enjoy the ideas submitted by your participants in 'comment cards'. Respond to their ideas, ask questions back and monitor how others are reacting to the different ideas to get a sense of what consensus might be building.
5. Review your automated research insights
At the end of the conversation, Multytude will provide you with an automated insights report covering the idea clusters that were most discussed, the sentiment towards each idea, valuable contributors (should you wish to reward them!) and more.
Stop using surveys, polls and focus groups for your idea gathering sessions. Use Multytude instead for a more collaborative, fun and insightful experience.
