Tips for Defining Community-Member Profiles

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Most of our customers have done a poor job defining member profiles. This is one of the biggest opportunities for improvement that Vovici sees in our clients' online communities, especially as it relates to using communities for feedback. 

Community-member profiles should provide all the data needed to achieve three primary purposes:  1) for embedding information to shorten questionnaires, 2) for enabling detailed cross-tabulation and segmentation, and 3) for identifying selected subgroups to invite to surveys and other activities.  You should keep each of these in mind when defining what fields you want to store about each community member:

1. Embedding Information to Shorten Questionnaires - Don't ask respondents questions that your organization already knows the answer to.  Think about how you feel when you have to fill out a contact form at a doctor's office:  bored.  It's a tedious experience of filling out paperwork.  When you write a survey that asks for that type of rote information, you increase the abandonment rate of that survey.  Instead, integrate your online community with your CRM system or other sources of such information.  Bring over demographic information and data about the member's most recent transaction.  For an example of what not to do, see Jim Davies' account of a bad-survey experience with an airline, where this step wasn't followed. 
2. Cross-Tabulation and Segmentation - Think about how your organization wants to cross-tabulate and analyze survey results and make sure the member profile contains the appropriate demographic and "firmographic" data (information about the organization they work for) to support this analysis.  Now take this a step further, as Yahoo! does with their profiles:  create fields that are derived from data but that reflect a useful segmentation.  Perhaps you want to classify members by the volume of annual business they do with your firm, by how profitable they are or by how likely they are to renew.  When you synchronize your community with the appropriate external data source, have your synchronization utility calculate and store the appropriate segmentations for each member.
3. Inviting Subsamples - Sometimes you want to invite specific subpopulations of your community to special surveys, focus groups or other community events.  Make sure that you are capturing the appropriate information to enable this.  These fields should be similar to the fields you need for cross-tabulation and segmentation, but you might want more detail on physical location, past purchases and usage of your organization's services than you defined for your cross-tabs and analysis.  This might be an opportunity to incorporate what Bob Page of Yahoo! called "Observed Data", behavioral information such as how often members log-in to the community and how often they participate in forums; these fields can be used when conducting research around improving the community.

The extra effort of integrating these profiles with external data sources is worth it.  Surveys are simply more engaging when they are shorter and when the questions are specific and personalized to an individual community member.  Properly done, profiles provide members with better survey experiences and provide your organization with a richer source of insights.

Make sure your organization takes advantage of this opportunity to improve your community!