Steeped in insights

Editor's note: Richard Young is a London-based freelance writer and editor.

Cafédirect is a small organization – just a few dozen people work directly for the company in the U.K. But it’s incredibly influential. It was the country’s first, and remains its largest, 100-percent fair trade drinks brand and is the only tea and coffee business to have received accreditation from the Ethical Company Organisation, achieving No. 1 ranking and top marks in all categories across fair trade, human and animal welfare and environmental criteria.

Unsurprisingly, then, its customers tend to be passionate, engaged and activist by inclination. That passion translates into brand loyalty – and the company has long recognized the value of developing conversations with them.

“We have ‘friends of Cafédirect’ – a database of long-term, loyal customers who are typically hardcore fair-traders – and we correspond with them on a regular basis,” says Lorraine Kelleher, the organization’s strategic insights manager. With an active social media presence, it was obvious Cafédirect was a company comfortable with engagement.

“But we knew it was something of an underused resource – the communications team was really keen to get closer to them,” she says. “At the same time, we hadn’t done much in the way of formal research – the occasional survey, but nothing particularly rich in terms of insights. So there was a clear opportunity.”

Her other challenge was building Cafédirect’s reach. The team felt they understood the ethical consumer really well – after all, they were part of that community themselves. But to build a stronger business, and benefit the growers they work with, they knew they had to broaden their customer base.

Develop richer conversations

The logical step, then, was to develop richer conversations with customers. “In two of my previous roles I’d had the chance to use online communities,” Kelleher says. “At Lonely Planet, the independent travel guide publisher, we’d had a travellers’ forum, which was a great way to develop conversations with a large group. And at the BBC, operating on a much bigger scale, we’d used an online panel for both surveys and qualitative elements. Given Cafédirect’s size, and its existing database, I knew we were probably looking at something in between the two.”

The desire to do formal research was a clinching factor. A simple online forum – perhaps even a well-designed Facebook page – might have been enough to satisfy the pure community aspect. “But we recognized very early on that having proper control over the community and being able to screen users was important,” Kelleher says. “That meant having a platform specifically designed for research – incorporating screening and segmentation functions and allowing us to develop less structured formats like blogs and ideas forums. Basically, we wanted to be able to try different things.”

The new platform

Cafédirect had been working with a social business design consultancy, Visceral Business, which recommended London-based Dub when the idea of the community first came up. “The big plus with Dub was they had research experience, as well as being software specialists,” says Kelleher. “That gave us confidence they’d be able to offer guidance and support on getting the most value out of the platform – and in maintaining the community. Communities can easily eat into your time, so managing them well and developing actionable insights from them is key.”

Dub’s platform, IdeaStream, was born out of its founders’ desire to bring together the best of online panels and blogging platforms in a way that could help brands get beyond a simple focus group model. “The obvious goal was to create a body of insight based on sets of questions as well as more spontaneous activities taking place within a community – ideally, leading-edge consumers who can help companies develop concepts and ideas,” says Stephen Cribbett, Dub co-founder and CEO.

“Those new methods needed new technology – as well as a greater understanding of how people behave online. So the obvious next step was to take a fresh look, develop the kind of social software that could help online-savvy marketers run these communities and then lease it out to researchers and brands.”

IdeaStream is a Web-based insight and co-creation community platform, designed for longitudinal communities ranging from two to more than 1,000 members. It combines online qualitative and quantitative tools, from blogs and forums to ideation exercises and picture galleries. As well as responding to exercises and tasks set them, members can start their own discussions and engage members in the community – often one of the most insightful forms of engagement.

Clear parameters

At the outset of their foray into community-building, Kelleher and the Cafédirect team were working with some clear parameters. For example, they had a modest budget. “And we’re a social enterprise – 50 percent of our profits go to our growers,” Kelleher says. “That meant we needed to be able to quantify the benefits from the investment in a community platform and demonstrate why it was of more value than a simple forum.”

Cafédirect also had a couple of specific outputs in mind. For example, a packaging redesign in 2009 had resulted in a suboptimal performance for the brand on supermarket shelves. But in order to invest in further change, it needed to understand exactly how consumers felt about it. Nevertheless, says Kelleher, they tried to keep the brief from becoming too prescriptive.

“Speed was really interesting to the team at Cafédirect,” says Cribbett. “They were working on the rebranding and developing some new pack designs so the idea of fast insight and rapid iteration really appealed. We looked at what they had – a decent database of engaged consumers and a list of e-mail addresses. Their research effort was essentially surveys sent to that database. But since we were looking for both speed and depth of insight, we decided to target the top 1 percent of customers. So we analyzed the database, helped design a screening mechanism and segmented the customers.”

Tailored to the brand

Identifying potential users was one thing but because communities are designed to deliver a deeper connection than other forms of consumer interaction, they also need to be tailored to the brand. It was vital to reflect Cafédirect’s strong ethical approach and community values. “Software customization played a key role,” Cribbett says. “The environment had to be on-brand. It had to be both safe and exciting, while also making users feel that they were being listened to and respected.”

In fact, Kelleher says, Cafédirect has found it easy to keep the look and feel of the community fresh. “Design is important,” she says. “If it’s too static, it can become boring but the platform allows us to change the widgets that appear on people’s screens and add different elements like text boxes and pictures. There’s lots of functionality to make engagement with the community easier, whether it’s spur-of-the-moment questions or dropping in support messages. I’m not particularly techie, but I don’t have any problems using the system.”

“It’s all Web-based, and that means it’s also very accessible to people within Cafédirect,” Cribbett adds. “It’s also easy for their supplier network to access it if they like, which, for a company like Cafédirect, is a valuable piece of functionality.”

A challenge

Having a flexible platform with a host of features is one thing. But a community needs members. “The implementation was really smooth, although getting people invited and on board in the first place was a challenge,” says Kelleher. “You still have to manage all the database admin and send out personal invitations, as well as authorizing users. But Dub’s help with the screening was a big plus.”

Once Cafédirect had sent out 1,000 e-mails, she says, the project really started to capture their imagination. “Seeing the number of community members climb as people signed up was really exciting. You sensed that there was a community forming right before your eyes. And that’s a serious point: An online community does give you instant gratification. You ask a question and very quickly you’re getting responses back.”

“The critical thing is not to force people to adopt new behaviors in order to be an active part of each community,” says Cribbett. “As much as possible, it should be easy for consumers to turn up and take part. We know that in many online quantitative surveys, participation drops off markedly, partly through bad design and partly because panels can be overworked. That isn’t the case with communities.”

With the community building up, Cafédirect put it to the test: What about that packaging? The results were conclusive. “Even existing customers were confused by it or disliked it. And, combined with the sales results, that convinced us to make a change,” says Kelleher. “When you get that kind of clear backup for decisions, it’s not surprising that the community quickly becomes an important part of the business. People soon referred to our community members as Cafédirectors.”

Permeated the organization

One of the big benefits for Cafédirect has been the way its community has permeated the organization. For a start, employees were members of the community from the beginning. “So they can dip into it themselves, and that’s important,” says Kelleher. “They know what goes on within the community, how it works and what it feels like to be a Cafédirector. The other benefit of having your own people within the community is that it’s not a totally blank canvas when people start to arrive.”

That’s not to say it’s anarchic. “Although it’s highly accessible within Cafédirect, getting the right people to run the community is a key part of the project,” says Cribbett. “We needed a specific skill set and Lorraine helped identify the social media team as the right place to look. She brought the market research skills, of course, but the secret to the community’s success has been that the whole organization can engage with it in the right way.”

Aside from the ability to customize the look for the community, Kelleher has been happy with IdeaStream’s back-end functionality. “It’s really straightforward. For example, we can very easily add tags and notes to conversations which makes distributing, analyzing and discussing them here within Cafédirect much easier,” she says.

After the success of the packaging research – and the clear popularity among Cafédirect’s employees for diving into conversations with the Cafédirectors – Kelleher wasted no time in looking for other projects. “We started to think about tea,” she says. “I looked around the organization to see how the community could support our decision-making in that market – for example, whether we should use square or round teabags.”

That highlights another key consideration: How do you tackle quite dull topics in a vibrant community? “We tried to mix it up a bit – develop some more creative discussions to keep the community lively, while still testing reactions to that kind of question,” Kelleher says. Dub also brought its experience in research to bear, helping the team phrase questions topics in a way that would encourage richer responses.

Creates options

One benefit of a platform solution is that it creates options – both in terms of how it’s used and how big it can get. “It’s true that we’re probably not using it to its full capacity right now,” says Kelleher. “But it’s great to have that potential for the future. For example, we run monthly surveys within the community but we would also like to be able to focus on more detailed topics when the need arises.”

Right now Kelleher and the rest of the Cafédirect staff are looking for richness and depth of insight rather than raw volume. “But I still want to increase the size of the community, in part to ensure we’re getting fresh views into it. So we’re recruiting this year and looking again at the incentives we offer to people who engage more with the community. Then we might look at monthly topics on top of the more in-depth quarterly survey, perhaps involving face-to-face interviews or groups,” she says.

So while the community has more than justified itself on specific projects in the first year, the next stage might be more open-ended. “Ideally, it should become entirely self-sustaining,” says Cribbett. “Spontaneous conversations are incredibly valuable – much more than if the members were only ever responding to a questionnaire or a moderator’s prompt.”

“The ultimate aim is to take social media research to a new level,” he says. “It’s great to develop insights around packaging and rebranding and those other specific questions through the community. But there’s a real opportunity to tap into what consumers are saying more broadly – even outside the community. That can add another layer of sophistication, allowing organizations to reflect back into the market the language customers are using.”

Return on community engagement

Cafédirect is a highly social and ethical business by definition. So no one there needs to be convinced that there’s a return on community engagement. “Brands in general are increasingly ‘owned’ by their consumers,” says Cribbett. “So getting this kind of deep engagement is really important – and that’s something Cafédirect understands better than most.”

But from the outset it was clear that the Cafédirectors project would need to demonstrate tangible returns, too. “My objectives included a need for the community to generate the equivalent of £40,000 worth of research and new product development insights that we would otherwise have had to commission out,” says Kelleher. “It’s hard to put a precise number of the smaller insights we’ve taken from the community, especially the value people here get from simply being part of it. But in terms of the big decisions and topics, it’s easily hit that target.”

The other problem that a community solves is engagement. “Survey respondents can easily lose a sense of why they are taking part – there’s often no connection with the outputs,” says Cribbett. “But with a community, they can see how the brand is responding and they feel part of an ongoing conversation. That’s far more compelling.

“The outcome of any community activity has to be actionable insights,” he says. “That means knowing a lot about the business – so, for example, working with in-house teams breaks down a lot of the barriers. We provide the platform and then pretty much everything else is the company living its own values and interacting with consumers.”