Answers to your burning questions.

When thinking about costs for a successful insight community, be sure you are comparing apples-to-apples.

• Our services are comprehensive and cover the complexities involved with designing, creating, and running your community from the day-to-day details to ensuring your community is delivering strategic value and addressing your most critical learning needs.
• Because our solution is full-service, your monthly price includes a dedicated three-person account team of strategic thinkers and community gurus. Our other services—such as member recruitment and appreciation—are also part of the package. You don’t have to worry about figuring it out on your own. We’ve got the expertise to develop a custom solution that’s a perfect fit.
• You’ll have multiple ways to interact with members providing multiple opportunities for insight every WEEK. Our reporting deliverables are tailored to meet your needs with frequency ranging from weekly to monthly depending on the business need.
• We offer monthly subscription pricing at a variety of service levels ranging from $20–40K per month, and design custom subscriptions to meet the unique needs of our clients. Service levels vary based on community activity and content analysis deliverables.

• Communispace has a dedicated, full-service Member Services department that is one of our “secret weapons” for your community’s success. This team handles the recruiting and member management efforts for your communities. Recruiting for communities requires a specialized approach to make sure you attract and retain the ‘right’ people for your community. Their experience recruiting members for hundreds of communities with diverse criteria allows us to successfully find even the most difficult or hard-to-reach members.
• Whether you want to engage your current customers, prospective customers or some combination of the two, we have a variety of resources and solutions to make it happen.  

Clients who have the most success with their communities tend to use them for a balance of feedback and discovery activities. That is, they are able to answer both fast-turn, tactical questions as well as dive deep into their customers’ mindsets and behaviors to provide insight for more strategic initiatives.

Because it’s fast, flexible, and always on, a private community can help you: 

• Accelerate innovation by identifying unmet needs
• Surface emerging lifestyle trends
• Obtain in-depth, on-point, and relevant customer feedback to business-focused questions
• Focus and hone marketing strategies, corporate communications, and social-media plans
• Bring the customer mindset to your most important initiatives
• Follow up with customers to understand deeper issues
• Gather customer verbatims and imagery to use in management presentations, reports, speeches, etc.
• Drop ideas into a controlled environment and refine messages before amplifying
• Mitigate risk by involving customers in the decision making process ... early and often in the process
• Have the pulse of your customers at your fingertips
• Take community findings from “insight to inspiration”

• Private, invitation-only, password-protected communities
• Companies tend to be more open with members in private communities because they can share more confidential and early-stage information during the ideation and development process. 

• Expertise: We’ve got customer-insight communities down to a science. Since 1999, we’ve built and facilitated over 500 communities for more than 100 clients in a variety of industries. We operate in 96 countries; we can recruit any target audience for B2C or B2B communities; and are constantly innovating new ways to push learnings from insight to inspiration. Building and managing private communities is all we do ... and our 90% client retention rate is evidence our clients appreciate our dedication and focus.
• Engagement: A private Communispace community provides a host of interactive experiences—each with its own way of eliciting rich, actionable insights. Engagement is the key to a successful community and no other provider, online or off, gives you so many ways to tap your customers for fast and thoughtful responses and ideas. This high level of activity is possible because of the intimate and authentic environment that only we can create—resulting in the ability to get very rich intelligence on a wide variety of issues. 
  • By engaging with and listening to your customers, you will gain continuous, real-time, unfettered access to their thoughts and feelings—and hear things you’ve never heard before.
   
• Partnership: Our team becomes an extension of your own. Behind every Communispace community is a dedicated team of highly skilled professionals who become intimately familiar with your business. From recruiting through facilitation and insight mining, every action we take will directly support your learning agenda and business goals.

• Ask how many communities (get a number) they have built for customer engagement or insights.
  • Get several client references, if possible. You don’t want to be their guinea pig.
   
• Ask to see a report from the community.
  • How will they deliver insights and findings?
  • How actionable are the reports?
  • Would your senior executives learn something from it?
   
• Ask how they will keep members engaged and participation high. They should be able to articulate their methods and best practices for establishing and maintaining vibrancy.
• Ask how much can you do with the community.
  • How many activities per week?
  • How many times will they ask community members to provide feedback in a month?
   
• Ask about their professional services staff.
  • How many community consultants do they have? What are their backgrounds and experience level? How many consultants will be assigned to your community?
  • What do they know about customer insights?
   
• How experienced are they with online communities for customer insight?
• Have they ever run a community of moms (or investors, doctors, professionals, business travelers, or Millennials, etc…)?

But don’t just take our word for it,
industry analyst Denis Pombriant offers his take here.