what is an online research portal..?
An Online Research Portal is website-hosted community of people, usually 500 or less on which a company needs to gather qualitative data and/or consult on an ongoing basis. Members might be brand/product advocates, non-advocates, hard-to-reach participants, from a particular profession or demographic, or just a “general” panel, depending on the business goal.
The purpose of the community can be specific such as the creation of a new website or a brand/product/service, or general such as continuing ideation, tracking attitudes and preferences and/or forging better long-term customer relationships.
The community is housed and accessed via a secure interactive web portal, which offers a variety of modes of communication, and quantitative/qualitative methods to harvest site-generated insight including polls, forums and live online focus groups.