Research panels come in all shapes and sizes. Primarily, you should expect to determine your panel size by understanding and evaluating your needs. First, determine what type of panellists you need to answer questions on a regular basis. Are you looking for customers of your brand, or a specific product? Do you require representation from an entire market segment? Or are your needs broader at the general population level?

Once you have your criteria in place, determine the overall population of the group (or groups) and from there a minimum required sample. We recommend that your panel is 50% larger than the minimum required sample in order to account for drop out and typical panel engagement rates. This process can result in panels that comprise of just a few hundred members for niche and B2B needs, up to tens of thousands for products with a broad international market. To make the most efficient use of your panel budget, it's important to get this process right and ensure your panel is neither too large, nor too small.

Long-term panel engagement remains one of the biggest challenges that insight teams face. That's simply because of the number of factors that can impact it. Here are some of the best and easiest ways to boost your panel engagement:

Communicate and Feedback Often - the most successful research panels act as a two-way dialogue between brands and members. In recognition of their contributions, it's important to keep community members up to date with the latest brand developments and the impact that their feedback is having. This can be delivered through regular newsletters, updates to the homepage or dedicated news items.

Lead By Example - the InsightHub platform includes a number of social features that can be used to bolster panel engagement. To encourage regular login, vary the activities available on the platform homepage often, feedback to participants and be direct in your requests - highlighting the impact that surveys will have and why they are important to your brand.

Incentivise Engagement - a staple of the market research industry, incentivising participants to take part in surveys can provide a massive boost to engagement. This can be achieved by introducing point systems that provide either regular payouts or entries into prize draws. Consider weighting the activities want to encourage more of with the greatest rewards to really drive and direct behaviours.

Maintaining a clean database of members is an important factor in the success of your panel. A large group of un-engaged or unreachable members leads to low levels of activity, harms the reach of your surveys and can often be found at the root of disapointing response rates.

In order to maintain a robust database, it is first important to consider what will be stored in it. That is to say what user fields do you wish to record and how will these be used to segment members for future activities. Once you have settled on a structure, we recommend running a minimum of two initial recruitment waves with a further wave to top-up (or ideally grow) the panel size every six months. During these waves, it's also important to manage and remove unresponsive participants. This can be done by sending a re-engagement email asking if they would like to remain a part of the panel.

The answer to this question depends on a whole range of factors, the most important of which is what you hope to get out of the panel. In low-touch panel, a few hours per week to design new surveys, analyse existing results and manage database administration will be sufficient. In other cases where the panel forms the core of a research schedule, it may be more appropriate to hire a dedicated Panel Manager to lead such activities.

As a flexible research partner, the FlexMR team can advise on the time required to manage your panel and can provide a number of services to reduce the pressure on your team - including database, communication and engagement management.