Measuring ROI for Online Communities
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Fri, Nov 14, 2008
For the recent Forrester/Vovici webcast, "Reducing Feedback Cost Using Online Communities", one attendee asked how Return On Investment could be calculated for implementing market-research online communities.
Brad Bortner said that ROI would depend in part on how your organization was currently collecting qualitative data and how much you were spending on that methodology. In his part of the presentation, he pointed out that online communities were less expensive than focus groups and provided much more data.
Our CEO, Dean Wiltse, pointed out that Vovici offers a complimentary feedback assessment to serious prospects. We will conduct a survey across your organization to get a true picture of what the opportunity for implementing next-generation feedback might be; invariably, we find that our prospects and customers are using far more survey tools than they are aware of and have more ongoing research initiatives than their market-research department is keeping track of.
The assessment is valuable regardless of the platform vendor you end up choosing. We prepare a cost assessment and presentation to people who are thinking about implementing online community software and enterprise feedback management; this provides an estimated ROI they can use in their planning. This is an excellent way to determine the financial benefits of implementing research-oriented online communities.
Brad concluded his answer to the question by pointing out that this is "early days" for online communities for many of the companies he has spoken to. Many such organizations are not yet thinking of replacing other research modes, but are just experimenting. Once they see the success of the experiment, then they start moving money from qualitative research to online communities. As Brad concluded, "If you are running focus groups, the payoff from MROCs is pretty substantial. You can easily run $100,000 for a series of focus groups for location [facilities], moderation and analysis. Compare that to the cost of running your own community, which has a huge capacity for running not just one project but many projects over the years, and it pays for itself in one or two traditional projects a year." Brad pointed out that for groups that aren't doing qualitative research, these insights are purely additive, providing new insights, and calculation of the ROI needs to be done differently.
Once the community is implemented, you will discover many other common applications for it, providing an even greater ROI. I encourage you to view the webinar with Brad and Dean. To request your own complimentary analysis of ROI, please sign up for our feedback assessment.