Curate Panel: A Guide to Level 3 of the Research Hub Maturity Map

The Research Hub Maturity Map details four primary approaches to panel management with User Interviews. Each level—Automate Research, Standardize Research, Curate Panel, and Enrich Panel—represents a fundamental building block to achieving the highest levels of research maturity within an organization.

Welcome to the third guide in our series diving deeper into each level of the Research Hub Maturity Map. Level 3: Curated Panel represents a significant step up from the project-by-project recruiting in Levels 1 and 2 to a thoughtfully built panel of highly engaged users for repeatable recruitment. 

In this guide, you’ll learn everything you need to know to achieve Level 3: Curated Panel, including:

• What is Maturity Map Level 3: Curated Panel
• When and why your team might want to focus on Level 3
• Tutorials and best practices for getting started 

⚠️ Note: This is the third of a 4-part series detailing each level of the Research Hub Maturity Map. If you haven’t read Automate Research (Level 1) or Standardize Research (Level 2), you may want to start there.

What is Level 3 of the Research Hub Maturity Map: Curated Panel?

At this level, research recruiting is conducted using a maintained panel and self-serve process. Teams have started to build and maintain a panel using CSV uploads and/or opt-in forms, and they’re doing some organization or curation to enable self-serve recruiting using features like segments and invite rules. Teams are typically using at least two or three sources of participant data (which may include engagement data from User Interviews, imported user data from CRMs and other databases, and self-reported data from opt-in forms) to make recruitment effective decisions and build useful segments. 

With a maintained, curated panel, it becomes much easier to do qualitative research quickly and with greater frequency (especially with a niche, hard-to-recruit audience). Many teams still choose to recruit new participants from time to time, but building a curated panel can be a much more sustainable approach for teams who do research regularly. With direct and immediate access to the user data you need, you can make smart recruiting decisions without having to pull lists from other tools or work with other departments to find your target audience. Plus, participants who opt-in to research tend to have about 6x higher response rates than other participants!

Key User Interviews features used in Level 3:

• All the features from Levels 1 and 2, plus…
• Opt-in forms
• Dynamic segments
• Panel management
• Nurture campaigns
• Invite rules and limits
• PII masking
• Roles, teams, and panels

Who uses Level 3: Curated Panel?

Level 3 of Research Hub Maturity is made possible with our CRM plan, which includes all the features in the Workflow plan, plus some advanced panel management features. By the time you reach this level, you should’ve already set up branding and communication templates and connected testing tool integrations. 

You may choose to upgrade your panel usage to Level 3 when:

• You’re struggling to identify and recruit the right users on a consistent basis
• You risk over-recruiting from the same segments (and causing panel fatigue) due to lack of a centralized system
• You have started to build a panel, but you’re struggling to maintain active contact with participants, which is leading to low response rates

You can address these challenges by introducing additional participant data sources (including opt-in forms), protecting the participant experience with invite rules and limits, launching nurture campaigns to keep your panel “warm,” and creating a process for cleaning, culling, and updating participant data over time.

How to get started with Research Hub Level 3: Curated Panel

🚀 Get started with Research Hub Level 3: Curated Panel
‍1. Use CSV uploads and opt-in forms to build your panel.
2. Set up invite rules and limits to protect the participant experience.
3. Set up roles and permissions (if you haven’t already).
4. Apply filters and labels to start grouping participants.
5. Create dynamic segments for commonly targeted segments.
6. Use bulk emails to nurture your panel.
7. Create a process for cleaning and updating your data over time.

1. Use CSV uploads and opt-in forms to build your panel.

CSV uploads and opt-in forms are a great way to build your Hub panel. At earlier stages of maturity, you’ve probably already used CSV files to upload lists of participants to your Hub panel, but opt-ins are a great addition to your panel building strategy. 

Pro tip: The hardest part of successful opt-in forms is distributing them! To get the form out to your users, share links through your email lists, social media channels, pop-ups in your product or on your website, onboarding material, etc.—you know your users best, so share your opt-in forms wherever they’re most likely to see it and fill it out.

To create an opt-in form, click "Participants" from the left navigation bar on your User Interviews homepage. In the top right corner, use the "Build" dropdown and click "Manage opt-in forms.” Then, click the “+ Create new” button. This will prompt a new opt-in form ready for your edits and customization. You can select from a set of default questions and create as many additional custom questions, pages, and skip logic rules as you like to collect the data that’s important to you.

2. Set up invite rules and limits to protect the participant experience.

Invite rules and limits are both set by users with admin permissions:

• Invite rules are a standardized criteria your team can set to make sure you’re inviting the right participants at the right time for Hub projects. These rules will automatically apply to all Hub study invites sent by your team, and are a great way to create consistency in who you invite across all your team’s studies. 
• Invite limits allow you to set an upper limit on the number of invites that can be sent for each project created by your team to prevent over-recruiting of your audience. They are set as a multiple of the requested number of participants and can be adjusted by admins at any time.

To set up invite rules and limits, navigate to your Hub participant table, click “Settings" and choose "Edit Hub invite rules" from the dropdown. Set the maximum number of invites for your projects in the box provided, and add as many rules as you need, and click "Publish Changes" and your Hub invite rules will be applied to all future team projects.

We recommend setting some standard invite rules to limit recruitment to participants who:

• Were last invited more than 30 days ago
• Last applied more than 90 days ago
• Haven’t completed a study with you before
• Haven’t been paid more than $600 in incentives within the past year ($600 is a typical max to help U.S.-based participants stay under taxable limits)
• Fit your ideal participant persona based on custom field criteria

💡 Pro tip: While the above list presents practical examples to get you started, it’s important to think about which rules are right for your team at any given time based on how many researchers are launching projects, the volume of research you have planned, and the current size of your panel. If you apply rules that are too restrictive, you could cause invitation issues and frustration for researchers—but if your rules aren’t restrictive enough, you risk quickly maxing out your panel population and researchers will struggle to send the right number of invites. So the ideal rules and limits will look different for different teams, and over time, your original rules might need to be updated as your panel grows. 

3. Set up roles and permissions (if you haven’t already).

Roles and permissions allow you to adjust visibility and access for different collaborators on your team. You may have already set up team roles and permissions early on in your Research Hub journey, but if you haven’t yet, this is a key action to take to achieve Level 3. 

Users with Admin access can manage the roles and permissions of their team on the Members tab of your Team Settings page. Scroll down to the Active Members section and choose the level of access you want each team member to have from the dropdown. From here, you can also deactivate team members so their access is revoked by clicking the ellipses to the right of their name. 

✍️Note: Team Admins can choose to obscure participant PII to further restrict a Researcher’s role access. To enable this setting, please email your CSM.

4. Apply filters and labels to start grouping participants.

Filters allow you to find participants that fit any criteria for which you have data stored in Research Hub, including participation history, contact information, or data from any custom fields, while labels allow you to build flexible lists to group participants based on any criteria that’s important to you.

To filter for participants, navigate to your Hub panel and click “Filter” in the top right corner. You can choose any combination of default and custom filters to search for the right group of participants. 

Once you’ve found and selected the right group of participants, you can label them by clicking the "Edit labels" option from the Settings dropdown. Then, click the “Add label” option from the Bulk actions menu, and select the label you want to associate with those users. Once you've created labels, they will appear as a column in your Hub panel and you can filter by them.

Two common use cases for labels include:

• When you invite participants by uploading a CSV to a specific project, you can create and apply a label for the project title at the time of import. This allows you to filter and see exactly who was invited to a specific study, regardless of whether they participated.
• Sometimes (especially if your primary panel building tactic is opt-in forms), there are internal labels you may need to assign for organizational purposes—for example, things like churn risk, “do not recruit” customers, and other important contexts. In these cases, you may also want to tag participants with information that isn’t represented in a custom field. 

💡Note: When Hub data is exported, labels are not included. So if there are any data points that would be crucial to get into a CSV export for further sorting / filtering, you should add that info as a custom field instead.

5. Create dynamic segments for commonly targeted segments.

Dynamic segments are custom, pre-saved groups of participants that automatically add or remove participants based on your filter criteria and any changes in participant data. They allow your entire team to quickly pinpoint the right users for their research and retarget the same group for future studies.

There are two ways to create a segment. First, click on the “filter” button at the top of your Hub table. Add as many filters as you need to narrow down your group of participants, and click “apply.” Click the “Save as new segment” button that appears at the top of your database. Your saved segment will appear to the left of your database and you, or members of your team, can reuse it anytime.

You can also create new segments by clicking “Add” in the left hand side of your database, above any segments you already have saved. Note that you can create both shared and private segments with limited viewing access to specific researchers on your team (although researchers will still be able to view and recruit these participants in the All Participants panel view). 

6. Use bulk emails to nurture your panel.

Keeping in touch with participants outside of the context of studies will improve your response rates when the time for recruiting rolls around again. Using the bulk email feature of Research Hub, you can send regular updates and newsletters to nurture participants and maintain their interest in applying for studies. 

To send bulk emails, navigate to your Hub panel database and select which participants you would like to contact. Then, click on the “Bulk actions” dropdown and select “Compose email.” Next, you can confirm the list of participants selected, choose a Sender profile, and compose your email. We will automatically apply the default email theme that you set up in Level 2. 

7. Create a process for cleaning and updating your data over time.

Finally, you’ll need to put a strategy in place for keeping your curated panel up to date. 

Two good ways to find outdated participant records are:

• Use a combined filter to find participants whose last invited date is less than 365 days ago, and last applied date is more than 180 days ago (i.e., they were invited in the last year but haven't applied in the last 6 months). These are unengaged users, and it’s worth using bulk emails to contact them about whether or not they’d like to be removed from your list. 
• Filter by participant names and look for instances of the same name to identify duplicate records. Once you’ve identified duplicates, contact each participant and ask them which of their records is preferred. 

Once you’ve identified participant data you need to update or delete, you can edit participant data individually by clicking the “edit” icon in the top right corner of their profile, or in bulk by re-uploading the correct data in a CSV. You can also send these participants an opt-in form to update their participant records with their most recent responses.

⭐ Bonus tip: If your team doesn’t have the capacity to regularly screen, edit, and update your participant data, you can automate this process using our Hub API and data integrations. We’ll talk more about the API in Level 4: Enrich Panel, but you can explore the API ahead of time here. 

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