Online Bulletin Boards
We’re all familiar with bulletin boards – the classic image of an Elementary School board full of bright colors or a community bulletin board covered in business cards might come to mind for many of us. But what is a virtual bulletin board?
A virtual or digital bulletin board is an online space where participants are able to share feedback and questions about a specific topic. These boards are also a place where participants can read and respond to others’ comments as well. Think of them as private, online forums focused on a particular issue.
This format can be incredibly useful for businesses trying to better understand their customers. Online bulletin board research for marketing or as a form of focus group is a great way to get measurable data
from potential customers. The company can then use this data to make better business decisions.
Technological advances have really transformed the type and amount of data that can be collected, and online bulletin boards enable businesses to use the latest and greatest that technology has to offer to really connect with customers and get the best insights possible.
Biometric shopping studies, eye tracking, virtual shopping experiments, facial electromyography, and neurometric research are all cutting edge areas being used in modern market research. At Nimbus, we work with our clients to decide exactly which technologies will get the most accurate and useful data
you need, and integrate them into a digital bulletin board based focus group designed just for you.
What Is a Bulletin Board in Market Research?
Using a bulletin board approach for a focus group is also called an “asynchronous” focus group. Asynchronous means not happening at the same time, so these focus groups allow participants to give feedback and interact with each other as it fits with their own schedule, rather than
sitting in the same room (or virtual call).
Each electronic bulletin board focus group has its own rules for participation and timeline. Some may be open for a week and request each participant answer a set number of questions during that time, while others may be open for a month or longer and request each participant login once every 3 days and comment on at least one other person’s responses. Overall, it can be helpful to think of these bulletin board focus groups as a community bulletin board where everyone posts regularly and shares relevant comments, photos, videos or questions.
As you can see in this example of one of our Nimbus platform online bulletin boards, the user interface can be very streamlined and straightforward. This makes it easy for participants to quickly and easily respond to questions or give feedback on products.
You have the option of allowing participants to interact with each other and comment on others’ responses, or keep things more private. A combination of participants interacting and having one-on-one attention can often give more insights than either method on its own.
How Do Online Bulletin Boards Work?
To better explain how these bulletin board focus groups work, let’s look at some online bulletin board examples. At Nimbus, we specialize in helping companies decide the questions they want to ask and who they want to target to get the most useful insights. Here are two ways we might set up a virtual bulletin board template to help theoretical companies get information they can act on:
What Is a Bulletin Board Example for Focus Groups?
● A cheese manufacturer, Cheesy Options, wants insights to help them determine which new cheese type should be added to their line. Nimbus works with them to define their target audience and find participants. Then, our team will set up a bulletin board that is open for a week and requests participants:
○ Fill out a survey about their cheese preferences, then comment on the results
○ Do a taste test of multiple cheese varieties and record their favorites
○ Submit a photo of their home cheese drawer with their current cheese preferences
○ Watch a virtual tour of a supermarket that includes eye tracking to see which cheese types received the longest looks
○ The participant’s responses can then all be analyzed and prepared as a report that might include data like:
■ 62% of cheese lovers buy cheddar, mozzarella, and parmesan cheese at least monthly
■ Of the other cheese options, provolone is the most common favorite, with 23% of participants preferring or already buying it from other sources
○ Cheesy Options can now plan to introduce provolone to their product line
● A birdwatching app, Birds Are Us, wants to better understand their users’ experiences as they get ready to develop their product for an international market. We find participants willing to use the app and provide feedback, then set up the online board to give Birds Are Us the most usable feedback possible.
○ Bulletin board runs for 2 weeks and requests participants to log in at least once every 48 hours
○ Users are asked upload a video of how they use the app during a birdwatching session
○ A board moderator asks daily questions created with the app designers for more targeted feedback, such as:
■ How long does it take you to find a bird species in the app once you have observed it?
■ Do you use the community feature to connect with other local birders?
○ An analysis of participant’s responses might show Birds Are Us that:
■ 42% of users stopped using the app at least once a week because it took too long to find the bird species they were trying to input
■ Over half the participants use the community features and would like an in-app option for planning in-person events and meetups with other birders.
○ Birds Are Us can now focus on improving the speed of bird searches and adding event planning to the community section before they launch to a wider market.
Advantages of an Online Bulletin Board for Business Marketing Research
There are some huge benefits for using this type of bulletin board approach for business marketing and research. First, let’s go over some of the general advantages for using focus groups for business insights, then dive into the specific advantages of the bulletin board format for these focus groups over some of the other options.
Advantages of Focus Groups
Focus groups are a great qualitative way of gathering feedback from real people about your company and its products. It is all too easy for companies to develop a certain mindset about how things work and not realize that their potential customers actually view or use their product differently than the company thinks. Here are some examples of ways focus groups have provided important insights for various organizations:
● Continental Mills was considering a redesign to their pancake and muffin mix packaging. A tailored focus group concluded that shoppers wildly preferred the original design, and launching the redesigned packaging was projected to lose the company $19 million in the first year.
● Kimberly-Clark wanted to plan a packaging upgrade for their disposable diapers to make them more appealing to mothers and increase sales. A well-planned focus group identified several small changes that ultimately led to a 22% increase in sales in the test markets.
● Pan Pacific luxury hotels were planning an ad campaign featuring the gorgeous views outside their hotel rooms and wanted to test the performance of this type of ad before committing. A thorough focus group illustrated that by far the most important thing to their target market was a comfortable night sleep, so they shifted the ad focus to their newly introduced top of the line beds.
Advantages of Bulletin Board Focus Groups
The potential insights gained from focus groups can have game changing results for a business, but there are many different focus group formats to choose from. The bulletin board format offers some specific advantages over other styles of focus group like:
● People can participate on their own schedules.
○ Get a wider range of participants from more demographics
○ Potentially get more or better feedback
● Participants are tracked for a longer period of time (days, weeks or months).
● Moderators can interact with participants one-on-one or in smaller groups to follow up on important points that might be overlooked in larger settings.
● Anonymity of the format can make it easier to collect honest opinions or data on sensitive or controversial subjects.
● Preparing reports is streamlined since there are more transcription options for feedback in this format compared to live groups. We’ll go into more detail about reports in a later section.
Disadvantages of Online Bulletin Board Market Research
The bulletin board approach to market research has many great advantages, but there are some instances where a different format might be more effective. In some situations, combining this bulletin board style with another approach may be the best way to get the insights you need. This might include:
● Immediate responses or first impressions. If getting a feel for the knee-jerk reaction of potential customers is the goal, bulletin board style feedback will be less useful.
● Strong interactions between participants. People commenting and discussing with each other verbally in real time will behave differently than leaving typed comments with delayed responses.
If these elements are important parts of the feedback needed, there are still ways to use a bulletin board approach in addition to other focus group practices. An example of an online bulletin board being used with these challenges is to simply add an in-person or virtual meeting as one of the tasks or modules on the bulletin board platform. Participants can then still give their first impressions and spontaneously discuss the product, but return to the bulletin board at a later time and add more insights.
How Do You Create a Virtual Bulletin Board?
Although you could cobble together a virtual bulletin board to host your focus group using online tools that weren’t designed for that purpose, it’s not ideal. Many of these piecemeal systems are ultimately going to be time and labor intensive. They are also likely to produce a sub-par experience for participants and less usable data for the company hosting them.
That’s why Nimbus created our own, custom made, ready to use platform designed specifically for bulletin board focus groups. There’s no designing from scratch, no need to find workarounds for limited technology, and no stress in planning how to gather the data you need. We even help you develop the best questions and discussion prompts to get to the insights you want most, and can help you find the ideal participants as well.
How Do You Use Digital Bulletin Board Data to Create Reports?
During the creation process of your digital bulletin board, it is important to think about how you will prepare the data you gather into a usable report. Some common tasks needed to turn digital bulletin board focus group results into data include:
● Transcribing verbal conversations
● Compiling questionnaire results
● Interpreting results from things like eye tracking studies
All these things require time and/or the right technology to make the process go smoothly. At Nimbus, we do all this for you – producing a ready-to-read report with all the details you need.
Making sure to get the right report into the right people’s hands is a huge part of what makes a successful focus group, whether you use a bulletin board style or any other form. A well-prepared report can be shared with your whole team to keep everyone on the same page, or tailored to just the stakeholders who will be making final decisions on the insights gathered.
How Do You Make a Virtual Bulletin Board Run Smoothly?
The best virtual bulletin board is one that allows as many participants as possible to complete their requested tasks and engage with other participants or moderators to give the most useful feedback. Here are a few tips and tricks for making the most of this kind of virtual bulletin board and streamline this whole process:
- Define the purpose of the focus group, and identify the exact type of feedback you would find most useful and actionable as a company.
- Establish your target audience and find participants for the group that match this audience as closely as possible. At Nimbus, we can help with identifying your target audience and then finding actual participants from our curated lists.
- Build in extra participants into the group because of dropout – not all will stay engaged through the entire process.
- Spend time crafting questions and activities for the participants to do that encourage them to share the kind of feedback you want in as many ways as possible.
- Have one or more moderators in the virtual bulletin board asking follow-up questions, monitoring group discussions, and keeping participants on track.
- Create a digital bulletin board template or instructional guide that is easy to navigate and clearly shows participants how and where to interact.
Virtual Bulletin Board Ideas
A recent study on the use of asynchronous online focus groups by healthcare professionals shed some light on important elements to consider when using the bulletin board format. Some best practices they identified include:
- Strike the right balance for the length of the Asynchronous Online Focus Group (AOFG) – not so long that people lose interest but not so short they do not have time to participate.
- Keep in mind the time zones and standard business hours for participants.
- Compose short, straightforward questions that encourage thoughtful responses.
- Remember that moderators won’t be able to ask followup questions in real time, so add additional probing questions for complicated issues.
- Choose the best platform to host AOFC, making sure to consider accessibility, security, cost, usability and familiarity to participants.
- Protect participants’ anonymity by assigning pseudonyms within the platform.
- Request the least amount of identifying information within the software as possible.
- Test the platform and questions thoroughly before beginning.
- Consider the technology requirements for participation and recruit participants who will be able to meet them.
- Explain clearly how this format will work for the focus group, and what is expected from participants before beginning.
- Begin with more participants than required, and expect dropout.
- Think about the sensitivity and potential controversy of the topic before deciding AOFG is the right format for the type of feedback desired.
- Employ at least two moderators for each AOFG.
- Provide access to the virtual bulletin board for employees so they can interact and comment with participants
- Contact participants often with specific links or reminders of tasks to encourage participation.
- Make sure a staff member is monitoring and available for quick technical help and troubleshooting.
Virtual Bulletin Board Case Study: The Everett Clinic
The Everett Clinic is a client who made good use of our bulletin board focus groups, so let’s take a closer look at how this style of asynchronous online focus group helped their business reach its goals.
The Everett Clinic runs 15 healthcare clinics near Seattle, Washington and were planning to open five new clinics. But they had two competing plans for what form these clinics should take: integrated (big with everything under one roof) or neighborhood-focused (small with primary care doctors only). Before they finalized plans for one of these two options, they wanted to know which style of clinics the local residences would prefer to use, so they could best serve their customers and increase revenue.
Nimbus was able to design, carry out, and produce a report summarizing four different online bulletin boards asking “How would you prefer to receive your primary health care and why?”
Each bulletin board was live for three days and participants were able to engage in their own time. They were requested to answer several detailed questions with follow up questions to provide additional detail, and encouraged to share pictures and videos to help explain their point of view.
After all the bulletin boards had been completed, Nimbus prepared a detailed, quantitative report that showed residents significantly preferred the neighborhood-focused approach, and expressed more enthusiasm for these clinic plans than the integrated approach. The Everett Clinic used these results to make the informed decision to open five new neighborhood-focused clinics to best serve their community and get the most of their investment.
Is There a Virtual Bulletin Board Platform that Helps Businesses with Focus Groups?
Have you been wondering “How do you make an interactive bulletin board online that actually works?”
Nimbus is here to make online focus groups easy to plan, execute, and gather usable insights from.
If you’re wanting to run a focus group for your company, but you’re not sure where to start, don’t worry—you’re not alone! At Nimbus, we know how important these focus group insights are to making your business a success, and also how much goes into getting them right.
We work with you to develop the plan you need, then offer the latest cutting edge technology to get your quantified, actionable data. How does it work? We break it down and help you through six easy steps to success:
- You identify your need for information – You want to know if your newest rain hat design is stylish
- You tell us at Nimbus – You want to hear from fashionista rain hat wearers
- We work together to find participants and come up with questions
- Nimbus does the work to create and run the focus group, then delivers a report of the results
- You learn your new style is good, but would be better with more sequins
- You add more sequins to your upcoming rainhat release and corner the rainhat market.
If you’re ready to get insights you can use, contact Nimbus today to get started!