Everybody's talking!

Editor's note: Michael B. Mercier is president of Insightful Alliance, a Batavia, Ohio, research firm.

In the typical bulletin board focus group the moderator posts one or two sets of questions each day. Participants are expected to provide their initial response to each question and then to discuss their responses with each other.

Getting participants to provide their initial response to each question is easy. However, getting them to engage in discussion can be a challenge for several reasons. First, some participants may simply lack a clear understanding that this is expected of them; they may perceive providing their initial response as being the primary expectation and interacting with others as secondary – or even optional. Second, some may perceive providing their initial response as being relatively easy to do yet perceive participating in discussion as being laborious. Third, some may be very time-constrained when responding. And, finally, some simply may resist becoming fully engaged in the board.

Every board will differ in terms of whether these challenges will emerge. Some will present all of these challenges, some will present none and the majority will fall between these two extremes. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to predict which of these challenges will emerge with any given board. Therefore, to be effective you must proactively manage the board to prevent them from emerging.

Your strategy for proactively managing the board should be designed to achieve the following objectives:

  • to carefully manage participants’ expectations of what will be required of them;
  • to provide an incentive for engaging in quality discussion;
  • to vigilantly ensure that respondents aren’t overburdened with too many questions; and 
  • to optimize the level of participant engagement.

Let’s review the tactics you can use to achieve these four objectives.

Managing expectations

To effectively manage expectations during a bulletin board focus group you must do two things: 1) establish the expectations early on and 2) continuously reinforce them throughout the focus group.

Establishing expectations. You should introduce as early as possible the expectation that respondents participate in the discussion. Ideally, you should introduce it during the recruitment by addressing it in either the recruitment e-mail or the recruitment phone script.

Present the expectations in a way that unambiguously imprints them in the minds of participants. Don’t simply mention them in passing. Rather, you should emphatically highlight them by dedicating a full paragraph to laying them out.  For example:

“During this discussion board focus group we will post questions twice a day and we will expect two things of you. First, we want you to provide your own response to each question. Second, we want you to engage in a lively discussion with other participants in which you comment on each other’s answers, pose questions to each other and, when appropriate, challenge each other. It is through such discussion that we will obtain the greatest insights – and therefore the greatest value – from the board.”

Continuously reinforce expectations. Once you have established expectations, reinforce them throughout the remainder of the project. There are several opportunities for doing this.

You can reinforce them in every correspondence prior to the beginning of the project (e.g., when you e-mail participation instructions or start-date reminders) and by embedding a reminder every time you post a new set of questions. You can also reinforce them on an individual basis by monitoring respondents and privately requesting that those who aren’t participating join the discussion.

Managing expectations will go a long way toward improving the quality of the discussion on your boards.

Bonus incentive

In addition to managing expectations, participants can be motivated to participate in discussion via a bonus incentive. For example, you might hold a competition that rewards the three participants who provide the highest-quality feedback with a bonus incentive of $75.

A bonus incentive will impact each person differently. Some will be highly motivated to escalate their participation in order to win the bonus, some will be moderately motivated and others will not at all be motivated.

A note of caution: You should expect to have one or two participants who take a quantity-over-quality approach to win the bonus incentive. Such people might, for example, copy and paste the same generic query onto the responses of 10 other participants. This dilutes the quality and depth of the discussion and should be discouraged by simply sending these participants a private note requesting that they readjust their approach and focus on posting fewer queries that take a more in-depth, personalized approach.

Finally, offering a bonus incentive provides a secondary benefit of serving as another point of communication that reinforces the importance of engaging in discussion during the board.

Ask only a manageable number of questions

Another way to optimize the group discussion is to ensure that the number of questions you ask remains manageable and doesn’t overwhelm participants.

Discussion board focus groups pose the constant risk of overwhelming respondents with too many questions. As the board progresses, new insights emerge that raise additional questions in the minds of both clients and moderators. In response, both parties are tempted to add new probes to each subsequent set of questions. If several questions are added to two, three or four consecutive sets of questions, respondents can easily begin to feel that they are giving much more time and energy than expected. To deal with the burden that these additional questions bring they may begin to skimp on the discussion.

Be vigilant – consider whether you really need to add a question. If you do, make an effort to trim others from the list.

Engage participants

Finally, you can increase the likelihood that respondents participate in discussion by engaging them.

Engaging participants yields tremendous benefits. When people become engaged during a bulletin board focus group they become so deeply involved in the conversation that they forget themselves and spend more time – and provide more thorough and revealing responses – than you’d ever imagine.

There are two basic levels of engaging people in the context of a bulletin board focus group: personal and intellectual.

To some extent we all engage both ways. However, many people are predisposed to one way or the other. Consequently, you’re going to have both types represented in any given bulletin board focus group. For this reason, it’s best to employ strategies that engage participants personally and intellectually.

Engaging on a personal level. We become engaged on a personal level when we connect with another person. What generates this feeling? A variety of things, such as having another person acknowledge something unique about us; identify points of similarity with us; or express interest in or appreciation for some quality that we possess.

As a moderator, you can generate this personal connection between yourself and participants using the following process.

First, elicit personal information about each participant. It is best to do this with the very first set of questions that you post. You might ask questions about their families, their hobbies, places they’ve lived, etc.

Once you have this information, react to it in a way that facilitates this feeling of connection. As stated above, you do this by acknowledging something unique about them, identifying points of similarity that you share or simply by expressing interest or appreciation.

Invest the time and effort to do this with every respondent. And you should do it as genuinely as possible to optimize the likelihood that you will engage as many people as you can.

While I’ve described how you can generate the feeling of connection between yourself and your participants, it’s important to keep in mind that you also can generate a feeling of connection between participants. This is an equally valid and effective way to get them engaged personally.

You can do this by forming your initial questions so that participants share their personal information with each other rather than with you. For example, perhaps with your first question you ask people to describe their top three-to-five hobbies and in the second question you ask them to read each other’s responses and reach out to those who have similar interests to find out how and why they initially got involved in that hobby.

Engaging on an intellectual level. People who are predisposed to engage intellectually become engaged when they use their minds to analyze a subject, formulate a perspective, articulate that perspective logically and then express it orally or in writing. And they especially become engaged when the subject interests them deeply.

One strategy for engaging people on an intellectual level during a bulletin board focus group is to optimize the number of unmasked questions.

What is an unmasked question? Most bulletin board platforms allow moderators to categorize each question as fully-masked, partially-masked or unmasked. With a fully-masked question, the participant’s response is never seen by others. With a partially-masked question, each respondent sees the responses of others only after s/he submits his or her own response. And with an unmasked question, respondents are allowed to see others’ responses prior to submitting their own.

Many moderators make the mistake of making all questions partially-masked. While in the abstract this can sound like a great strategy for eliminating any kind of peer bias, it also can kill discussion. If respondents are unable to read the responses of others prior to submitting their own initial response, it tends to decrease the likelihood that they will actually take the time to read others' responses and respond to them; there is a tendency to submit their answer and move on to the next question (Table 1).

However, if questions are unmasked and respondents are able to browse other participants’ responses prior to submitting their answers, then they are far more likely to be drawn into the discussion by being engaged intellectually before submitting their answers. If they are allowed to read others’ responses first, this can be a catalyst for drawing them into the discussion as their passions are ignited and they seek to present their own viewpoint.

Another approach is to ask debate-style questions early on in the discussion. People who engage intellectually tend to enjoy debate. To design an engaging debate question, take the overall topic of the board, select an aspect of that topic that is controversial or for which people tend to hold deep, strong opinions. Then simply ask participants to state their position and defend it.

Optimizing the value

By managing a bulletin board focus group in this strategic manner and striving to achieve these four objectives, we can ensure that we are generating lots of discussion and optimizing the value generated by the focus group.