As our most successful customers will tell you, the best insight communities are founded on partnerships—with cross-functional departments and stakeholders in your own business and with the Alida team of experts.
Top 10 Tips for Operationalizing Your Insight Community
1. Compelling Community Brand
A strong and distinct community brand will help to boost your teams’ visibility and help increase your influence within your company.
2. Insight Community Manager Skills
Running an insight community is as much about attitude as it is aptitude. To succeed, an insight community manager needs to have a progressive mindset and be constantly looking for ways to innovate and evolve the insight community program.
3. Interdepartmental Collaboration
Focus on what your stakeholders need and speak their language. The more actionable the materials for your colleagues, the more value you’re providing and the more likely other departments will come to you for high-impact, collaborative projects.
4. Team Roles Structure
Define clear roles within the team so that everyone knows exactly what they are responsible for so the insight community can be run smoothly and efficiently.
5. Develop Clear Systems
Insight communities run by several different departments and/or in multiple geographic regions require careful planning and consistent communication between project managers. Creating a clearly defined system will keep your communities organized and efficient.
6. Insight Roadmap
Developing an insight roadmap will help to keep your organization focused on customer centricity and give the insight community manager a path forward to inform the business.
7. Celebrate Success
Don’t be shy about celebrating success and don’t forget to share insight community successes with the rest of the organization.
8. Customer Success Manager
Alida’s Customer Success team is here to ensure the overall success and growth of your insights program. Leverage their experience and expertise to help you get the most value out of your insight community.
9. Extend Capabilities & Resources
Our professional services team can help you extend capabilities and resources if need be.
10. Education Opportunities
Alida Academy provides a highly flexible curriculum designed to help you become proficient at using Sparq to achieve your business goals.
Who Manages an Insight Community?
An insight community manager uses Sparq to program surveys and moderate online discussions and uses their analytic skills to identify the insights from their community or communities. Those with a slant to creativity and storytelling will find those skills helpful in assembling reports used by management to make data-based decisions. While a background in research and/or data analytics is beneficial, it is not mandatory. To succeed, a community manager should be able to:
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Navigate their organization and confidently speak with and present to stakeholders
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Showcase community findings in a way that resonates by effectively telling a story
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Project manage various aspects of the community such as research calendar planning through engagement strategy
Most insight community managers have very similar overall responsibilities to ensure the success of their insight communities. However, these responsibilities do not always belong to one person. Many community managers also work with junior project managers or other staff to accomplish the body of work, rather than the entire scope sitting with one person. Because each insight community is unique to a business, there is flexibility in determining the best way to resource.
Insight Community Manager Skills
Insight community management takes the research process and pipeline, member engagement, and stakeholder engagement into consideration in order to make the community a success.
A knack for understanding people: Having a good grasp of people's motivations is vital to creating the right balance of incentives, engagement activities, and communications. Community managers need to convince their target audience to join their communities and motivate members to continue to participate.
Excellent creative, communication skills: Community managers need to craft the right recruit message, create interesting content, and keep engagement activities fresh.
Project management: Project management is critical when running an insight community. All the steps in the research process are the same (from briefing through to design and reporting) but it all happens in hours or days, instead of weeks and months.
Organizational skills: Scheduling and conducting the small regular operational tasks and developing processes requires an organizational mindset. As an insight community manager, you are constantly juggling various projects and coordinating with different people, usually more than with traditional research.
Data analysis skills: To get insight into the health of your insight community, you need to be able to generate and interpret key metrics, as well as interpret both qualitative and quantitative data from projects.
Negotiation skills: Diplomacy, public relations, and business development skills round out a great community manager in their role as ambassador and sales person for the community. These skills are necessary for stakeholder activation and ongoing engagement. Engaged stakeholders means budget renewal and a full pipeline for the research calendar.
Insight Community Roles and Team Structure:

Roles Involved in Running an Insight Community: https://www.alida.com/the-alida-journal/roles-involved-in-running-an-insight-community
A Day in the Life of an Insight Community Manager
The typical responsibilities of an insight community manager can be thought of in three primary buckets:
Generating Insight
- Manage insight strategy and roadmap
- Research, design, and analysis
- Identify impactful integrations across applications
Engaging Community Members
- Develop and execute engagement strategy, manage member personas, recruiting new members, and design member experience
- Build healthy member relationships
- Share insights and related content back to the community
- Manage incentives program (if applicable)
Impacting the Business
- Engage with stakeholders by regularly liaising on their objectives and sharing research to inform decision making
- Share insights across the business
- Use preference and experience data to create stories to share with stakeholders

A Day in the Life of an Insight Community Manager: https://www.alida.com/the-alida-journal/a-day-in-the-life-of-an-insight-community-manager
Build an Insight Roadmap
An insight roadmap is a plan to keep your organization focused on customer centricity. It brings together stakeholders to agree on key objectives that your insight community will inform. It will help operationalize your community and give the community manager a path forward to inform the business. Some benefits of having an insight roadmap are:
Identifies Common Ground
Having a roadmap will help identify common themes from the pool of project requests from across the business. These can then be consolidated into broader projects.
Builds Empathy
Seeing the breadth of needs from across the organization may help stakeholders be more patient waiting for their project to come up in the queue.
Manages Member Experience
Having an insight roadmap helps avoid having too many activities that overburden members, and/or long lags between activities where members lose interest.
Demonstrates ROI
An insights roadmap ensures strong ROI on your community investment. It’s easier to demonstrate value when stakeholders across your organization have participated and understand how the business has been informed.
For more tips and suggestions read our blog on How to Build an Insight Roadmap for Customer Centricity
Develop Clear Systems
Insight communities run by several different departments and/or in multiple geographic regions require careful planning and consistent communication between project managers. Here we will outline how to create a clearly defined system that will keep your communities organized and efficient.
Organizational Tools
Planning Tools: A central place to document activities and sharebacks is essential to ensure members are being engaged in a thoughtful and cohesive manner. A shared document or calendar will help others understand what’s being planned and when communications will be deployed.
Hierarchy: We recommended assigning a single point of contact for each community (or in each region) responsible for ensuring that all platform users are logging their community activities into the shared document/calendar. He/she is also responsible for prioritizing activities.
Team Updates: Regular meetings between community managers is highly recommended to inform the team of upcoming activities and sharebacks, the community members who will be communicated with, and the priority of the projects.
Technical Details
Activities and Reports: Have a consistent internal naming convention for all activities and reports. This should incorporate the communities, departments, and activity itself. For example, if you have communities for Brand A and Brand B, accessed by sales and marketing, in the US, UK, and China, the naming convention could be:
- BrandB001 - SA020 - UK - Ladies Swimwear Study
- (Brand – Department – Region – Topic)
Question Names: A consistent method for question names should be implemented. For example, screener questions could be denoted with the letter S, with the main questions of the activity questions denoted with the letter Q. This enables a faster and more efficient search capability to identify questions that have been used before.
Example: S4_Employment, Q1_Agreement_Scale.
Profile Variables: A consistent manner should be used to avoid confusion and for ease of reporting and analysis. For example, add _US, _UK, or _CN to the end of your profile variables to denote the region, or if the same PV is used by all, add _GLOBAL.
Examples:
- S4_Employment _US
- Q9_Age_GLOBAL
Multiple Administrator Best Practices: https://www.alida.com/the-alida-journal/multiple-administrator-best-practices
Raise the Profile of Your Insight Team
Create a compelling brand
A strong and distinct brand helps amplify the value you bring to the organization. Consider the look and feel of your materials and make them easily recognizable to colleagues.
Boost your teams’ visibility to help increase your influence within your company:
- Speak at conferences to position your team as thought leaders.
- Write articles for websites like GreenBook to expand your reach to a wider audience.
- Enter award competitions, including Alida's customer awards, to give your work extra credibility from a third-party.
Embrace interdepartmental collaboration
Insight teams need to be included in interdisciplinary teams to represent the customer. Outputs from the insight team need to to be timely, clear, and action-oriented in order to be impactful.
Focus on what your stakeholders need. The more actionable the materials for your colleagues, the more value you’re providing and the more likely other departments will come to you for high-impact, collaborative projects.
Speak the language of your stakeholders
Speaking the language of the business is an essential step to ensuring that your contributions are recognized. Instead of using research jargon, use the language of your decision-makers and stakeholders.
Keep a record of your contributions to the organization. If your company uses Salesforce, for instance, set up a field that records the involvement of your team in all contracts won.
If customer feedback from an insight community leads to a successful product development, capture that through presentations to decision-makers, newsletters, and other internal communications.
Celebrate success loudly
Take a cue from your colleagues in sales, and don’t be shy about celebrating success. When sales teams win a new deal, they usually have a tradition, whether it’s ringing a bell, going for drinks, or throwing a big party. Instill similar rituals that you can adopt to recognize your team’s wins, and don’t forget to share your achievements within the company.
Leverage Our Customer Success Team
Your customer success team is here to ensure the overall success and growth of your insights program. Through the following touchpoints of the Customer Success Program, they will provide advice, best practices, and content to help you optimize the value of your insight community.
Success Planning
Develop a plan to support you in achieving your business goals and maximizing the value of your investment.
Regular Touch-Base & Monthly Snapshot
Have regular informal check-ins and get a monthly snapshot to support you in keeping up to date about product changes and keeping your insight community healthy.
Quarterly Review
These are deep-dives about how you can maximize the value of your insight community and what we can collectively do to keep you focused on achieving your business goals.
Annual Review
We will capture the impact your insight community has made on your business and refine your success plan.
Build Your Knowledge & Expertise

Education Opportunities
To help our customers quickly become proficient at using Sparq to achieve their business goals we have an enhanced core education program, Alida Academy, that is available with your Alida Sparq subscription at no extra cost. The curriculum is highly flexible and utilizes short classes to fit your schedule and pace.

You can even get certified as an Alida Administrator, in your own time frame, at your own pace. By attending classes and then taking accreditation exams, you’ll quickly progress the development of necessary skills to uncover actionable insights and fuel business decisions. Our website provides additional information on our education offerings.
Professional Services Catalogue
Alida stands at the ready to support your team. Our Professional Services Catalogue provides an overview of some of the ways in which Alida can extend your capabilities and resources.
Consultation
Solicit advice from Alida's community research experts.
Insight Roadmap
Get targeted expertise to build an effective community research and engagement program. Alida will assist you in developing an effective plan to execute community activities that answer strategic objectives and keep members engaged. You will receive a six-month plan for you to execute.
Insight Streams
Alida will design and build a program that combines reactive and proactive insight to inform decisions that matter to your business. You will receive a six-month plan and six programmed activities to get it started. If you choose, Alida can also assist you in executing the program for the first three months.
Bridging Services
Maintain your momentum following setup or through organizational change. Still hiring or onboarding staff to support your community? Alida can assist with additional support and implementation for three months to ensure organizational success of the platform.
Jump Start: Accelerating Time to Value
Community Jump Start is specifically aimed at accelerating your time to value. Community Jump Start enables our customers to accelerate time to value and quickly receive powerful customer insights. We have a full team dedicated to ensuring you have a seamless onboarding experience with Alida and through it all, your community manager will receive coaching from your customer success team.
Our customers accelerate time-to-value by dedicating one week with a community consultant who will work with you to complete core elements of community configuration. You will learn about community theory, planning, design, and execution best practices alongside your internal team.
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Complete over 15 hours of personalized hands-on Alida Sparq training.
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Learn how to build an insight roadmap in collaboration with your stakeholders.
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Develop a recruitment plan and a recruitment survey.
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Learn how to complete theming of your community.
- Author your first hub post.