What an MROC is
An MROC (market research online community) is a group of recruited, profiled people who take part in research on a private online platform over months or years. Members complete activities, answer questions and talk to the moderator and each other, so a brand or agency can keep going back to the same people as new questions come up.
You'll also hear it called an insight community, an online research community or a customer community. The names overlap and nobody polices them. In practice, agencies tend to say MROC, in-house teams tend to say insight community, and both mean the same thing: a standing group of people you can ask things of, with a relationship that carries on between projects.
That last part is what makes a community. The platform, the activities and the AI are the same tools you'd use on any online qual project. What's different is time, and what time lets you build: members who know the format, a profile of each person that gets richer with every activity, and a group you can return to next month with a question nobody has thought of yet.
How a community differs from a panel
A panel is a profiled list of people you can invite to research. The relationship is mostly transactional: you send an invitation, they complete a survey or a study, they get their reward. Panels are useful, and plenty of good research runs on them.
A community adds ongoing activity with the same members. They post, react to each other, see their own history and get to know the moderator. Over time they give you context a panel member never would, because you're asking about their week as well as their opinion of a concept.
The line between the two is blurry, and it's fine for it to be. At its simplest, a community can be just a panel: people you've recruited and profiled, ready to send to a survey when a question comes up. Many teams start there and add activities later. The University of Warwick's insight team already had a database of past survey respondents before they built the Warwick Student Panel on Qualzy, and the change they noticed was in how members related to each other:
Before this, although we had a database of people who'd participated in surveys, they never interacted together in a digital environment in the way that they now can. Qualzy changed that.
University of Warwick Market Research & Insight Team
How it differs from a short online discussion
An online discussion (or bulletin board, or async focus group) is recruited for one project. It runs for a few days or a few weeks, answers a defined brief and then closes. On Qualzy that's a Qualzy Discussions project: a quick discussion typically runs three to five days, and diaries and bulletin boards one to four weeks.
People sometimes call a two-week project a community. It isn't one, and the label causes trouble. A client who's been sold a "community" expects to come back next quarter to the same people, with their profiles and history intact. A fortnight's discussion doesn't give them that.
A simple test: will you go back to these people with a question you don't have yet? If the answer's yes, you want a community. If you know every question now and need answers by the end of the month, you want a discussion, and you'll pay less for it.
What runs inside a community
Most communities settle into a rhythm of one or two pieces of work a week, with something lighter in between. Typical content includes:
- Activities such as diaries, photo and video uploads, card sorts, pin tasks on stimulus and ideation, run with the whole community or a segment of it.
- Discussion threads where members respond to a question and to each other.
- Quick polls between deeper studies. Warwick runs weekly polls alongside activities such as mood boards and video responses.
- Surveys, with members sent to an external survey through tracked links.
- Recruitment for other work. Mustard Research has recruited community members into in-person client meetings.
The content is the bit people underestimate. A community needs a plan of what members will do, week by week, for as long as it runs. Flume, a Qualzy partner since 2017, describe the participant side simply:
Qualzy is as user friendly as Facebook or Instagram. People just post a picture or leave a post. We have platform users aged from 17 to 70, and we get fantastically rich content from all of them.
Emily Hale, Research Manager, Flume
How long communities run
Usually months, often years. Some are set up for a fixed programme, say six months around a product launch or a service change. Others run continuously and become part of how the organisation makes decisions.
Mustard Research's "Keep WM Moving!" community for Transport for West Midlands has been running since 2020. It has thousands of members, and its insight has informed £5bn of regional investment decisions. That's the far end of the scale, and it shows what a community can become when there's a steady flow of questions to put to it.
In long term communities like this I really feel we are using Qualzy in the best possible way.
Anthony Shephard-Williams, Mustard Research
Long-running communities need refreshing. Members drift away, life changes, and some become so practised at research that their answers stop sounding like everyone else's. Plan for topping up membership from the start rather than treating it as a rescue job in month 14.
Keeping members engaged
Engagement fades quietly, usually well before the response rate shows it. The communities that stay lively tend to do the same few things:
- Keep a predictable rhythm. Members who know something new arrives every Tuesday come back on Tuesday.
- Vary the effort. Mix a two-minute poll with a longer diary or video task, so taking part never feels like homework every time.
- Don't over-contact. Send each activity to the members it's right for, and give people a rest after a heavy week.
- Close the loop. Tell members what happened because of what they said. It's the cheapest engagement tool there is.
- Make rewards visible. Warwick sustains its panel with an incentive scheme of panel points and Amazon voucher prize draws.
- Protect people on sensitive topics. Letting members decide what others can see matters when you're asking about wellbeing or safety.
A moderator who's visibly present matters as much as any of these. Members can tell the difference between a community someone's tending and one that's being used as a mailing list.
When a community is the wrong choice
Communities are good at a lot, but they're the wrong tool more often than vendors admit.
- You have one question and a deadline. Recruit for that brief and run a discussion. Setting up a community for a single study costs more and takes longer.
- You need fresh, unconditioned voices. Long-standing members learn your brand and the way you ask questions. For first reactions to a new idea, people who've never seen your research are often better.
- You can't fill the calendar. If you can't name what members will do for the next three months, the community will go quiet, and a quiet community is hard to revive.
- You need live conversation. Some questions want a face-to-face interview or a group. Qualzy Live runs those, in the same project as your online work.
- Nobody owns the output. A community earns its keep when someone inside the organisation acts on it. Without an owner, findings pile up unread.
Running an MROC on Qualzy
Qualzy Community is the part of Qualzy built for this. You recruit once from your own list, members complete a branded screener and are profiled from their answers, and the portal carries your branding on your own domain. Activities, discussions and AI analysis run inside the community: every response is summarised and broken into key points with the verbatims behind them as it arrives, and theme analysis runs on each activity or wave once it has closed.
It's billed monthly and priced by panel size. If you're working out a budget, our guide to what an online research community costs goes through the things that move the number.
Common questions
Is an MROC the same as an insight community?
Broadly, yes. Both describe a recruited group taking part in research online over a long period. MROC is the older industry term; insight community is more common in client-side teams.
How many members does a community need?
It depends on how many segments you need to hear from and how many people each activity needs. The Warwick Student Panel has 464 active students, while the Transport for West Midlands community has thousands of members. Start from the activities you'll run, not from a round number.
Do members need to download an app?
Not on Qualzy. Members join from a link and take part in a web browser on any device, with nothing to install.
