Out with the old and in with the new - although not stated exactly like this, that is my summation of this year's GRIT report. As written in the opening remarks by editor Leonard Murphy, "market research is still changing, but at this point the change has been acknowledged by the majority and embraced by the many." What this is referring to is the move from old research techniques, such as telephone surveys, to what is being called 'New MR'. Recollective is quickly making a name for itself as one of the most innovative new software platforms available to agencies looking to conduct New MR. Hot on the heels of the Video Task released only a few weeks ago, we're delighted to say that we've further expanded the capabilities to include new private messaging, email broadcast and activity preview features. Private Messaging Feature Update Private Messaging is an important piece in a researcher's community management toolkit. If you're currently conducting a Recollective study, the Messages tool enables participants to contact you and for you to privately converse with them.
Messages are delivered to the participant's web-based inbox inside Recollective. For participants these messages are viewed as a single threaded discussion, with responses kept inline below the original message. Admins see an index page listing all active message threads. Messages marked 'Awaiting a reply' by admins make it easy to identify any participants slow to respond to your questions. Private messaging is important for researchers who want to probe for further insights from participants outside of a specific task response or open discussion topic. They can even be used for asynchronous text-based IDIs. One of our goals is to make our customers jobs as easy as possible while using Recollective, so when it's time to undertakde the task of analyzing messages, they can be coded, excerpted and included in transcripts just like any other participant data. Email Broadcast Feature Updates Not only have we tackled private messaging, but we've also made huge improvements to Recollective's Email Broadcast feature.
Simply filter participants by the appropriate criteria, such as the date they were added to the study, last activity completion, segments - or hand select individuals using the people-picker. We've also included the ability to insert dynamic fields (such as first name, last name, or username) so that your emails can be professionally personalized to the recipient. Task Preview Update In addition to messaging, we've improved usability for researchers by introducing a feature to preview Activities before they are made available to participants. This enables researchers to experience the task flow as a participant to check logic and links, catch those typos and double check that it is what you envisioned.I'm not sure how our team managed to pack all of this (plus some unglamourous bug fixes and UI updates) into one release, but they did. If you have any questions about these updates, would like more information on conducting Recollective studies or just want to chat with a friendly Canadian company, please don't hesitate to give us a call. If not, then watch out for more changes coming to your Recollective site next month - of course we're at it again!
.svg)
