Best Practices: Building a Recollective Home Page

In today’s blog, we’ll be providing you with some examples of how to organize your research community to improve participant engagement through the use of a Recollective study Home Page.

The Home Page tool in Recollective is going to act as a critical anchor and reference point for all of your community members whether you’re engaging with participants in a private short-term project, or an ongoing community with a lot of socialization and collaboration.

In today’s blog, we’ll be providing you with some examples of how to organize your research community to improve participant engagement through the use of a Recollective study Home Page:

  • What is the Recollective Home Page?
  • Recommended Content
  • Creative Examples

What is the Recollective Home Page?

At its core, the Recollective Home Page acts as the initial study landing page for your participants, administrators, and client observers. Like the rest of the platform, it’s fully customizable enabling you to personalize the experience by segment and scalable which means you can rest easy knowing that all of the content will be available across any device!

So what type of information can you actually add to the Recollective Home Page? Any text, photo, video or alternative filetype can be directly uploaded into the page and displayed to the user group of your choice. That means you can host everything from product or branding images, introductory videos, and even documents or legal agreements in PDF form. Additionally, Recollective has platform specific home page cards that allow you to link to key tools within the site such as upcoming activities, discussion topics, and even participant directory lists or point leaderboards!

Recommended Content

With so much flexibility on how to design and customize your Home Page, what type of content should you be prioritizing? Remember that the Home Page is typically the first thing your participants see upon being invited into your research community, so it’s highly recommended that you include some of the following staples:

Moderator / Researcher Introductions

You and your participants are going to be spending a lot of time together over the course of your project. One of the greatest ways to encourage participation and engagement is by taking the time to give a brief introduction! You’d be surprised by how much more receptive participants can be when it comes to talking openly about themselves and their relevant experiences if you can take a moment and personally connect with them through the platform. This personal connection can also help boost retention – when participants feel heard, it reinforces their commitment and dedication to the overall project.

If you’re running a community or project that involves a high volume of videos or blog style content, a quick little intro video instead of text goes a long way.

Project Outline and Schedule

Setting clear expectations from the start is key to ensure a successful study. A description or explanation of what the project is about, and how it’s going to be conducted is always a great way of keeping everyone informed on what is expected from them over the course of the project. For example, you can easily list information such as:

  • The overall schedule of activities and discussions that are going to appear over the course of the study
  • Major announcements or community updates
  • Incentive information and delivery schedules
  • Rules of proper conduct and behaviour if the project involves participant interaction / collaboration

Terms of Use / Legal Documentation

Remember that any text, media, or file content can be uploaded and hosted directly onto a Recollective Home Page. That means you can quickly publish up-to-date versions of any legal documentation that your participants can reference during the course of the study.

Creative Examples

Now that we’ve highlighted a few of the most common and basic ways you can setup your Home Page, let’s explore some additional creative examples.

Targeted Home Page Cards

Any Recollective home page card can be custom tailored and targeted to a specific audience. This includes specific participant segment groups, but even different admin roles such as your client observers and junior research moderators!

Why does this matter? It means you can fully customize the study experience to each individual user. You can have different instructions, incentive amounts, and alternate dates / content for different participant segments groups if needed. You can also display content or results that are only visible to your client observers.

Gamification & Featuring Participants

By taking advantage of our native study Points tool, you can easily publish a publicly accessible participant leaderboard that automatically highlights the most active members within your study. Any time a participant completes certain actions such as finishing activities or making discussion posts, they’re rewarded with a custom number of points you can set. In fact, you can introduce entire level schemes and custom badges for anyone that reaches certain point benchmarks!

You can also use the home page to setup a spotlight of a specific participant as well, which then acts as a direct link to their personal stream of activity and discussion responses:

Custom Embedding

Looking to add a branded Twitter feed or link to live news feeds? Just create a new card and embed the links directly to the source you’d like to display! This goes a long way in making the home page feel like a place to come for announcements and community updates.

There’s a ton of tools and capabilities available in Recollective to help you build an effective research community. No matter which tools you decide to use, and what type of project you’re trying to run, the best experience for yourself and your participants starts with a strong study Home Page!

Jared Nguyen
Vice President Strategic Projects

Let's research happy together