Globalpark EFS reviewed

How a panel differs from a community has become a bit of a topic among the research profession of late: how to avoid influence, whether incentives should be paid or not or even whether the two differ at all. It’s clear that there is diversity in understanding and practice, and in introducing community support to the Globalpark EFS interviewing suite (EFS stands for enterprise feedback management) this research software provider leaves those decisions to the individual. You could use the software to run multiple communities, multiple panels or any combination of the two, with different websites for members to use for each, and behind the scenes you may choose to keep all your panel members in one database and segregate them logically, or physically segregate them into separate databases.

Globalpark EFS splits the task into three essential components: panel (or panels), projects and websites (the panel members’ portal). Therefore if you had a panel of customers, and wanted to create a community of premium customers as an elite group drawn from the panel, you could create a special website for these customers. Surveys are deployed through the respondent-facing website, and can be deployed to more than one site. They can even be skinned differently, so the survey the premium customers get while the same survey as the general panel, could take on a different look, consistent with the premium site’s theme. It also makes this a very appropriate pick for research companies, alongside the corporate EFM customers that Globalpark target, since panels and surveys can easily be branded for different customers or contexts.

The real power of the system is in its ability to create multiple panel and community websites, and for these sites to contain dynamic content driven from a number of sources. It means that once the site has been configured, no further technical tweaking is required, provided you do not fundamentally change the scope of what you are doing. All the routine activities such as putting surveys live, inviting panellists to participate, collecting demographics and contact updates from members, reward redemption and the more community-oriented capabilities such as adding content to news feeds, featuring snap polls and results of surveys are simply managed through a set of attractive and straightforward control panels.

The site builder is another matter though – this is something aimed squarely at the web technician, and even then it will tax the specialist, as there is a lot to learn and a lot of layers to work through. What Globalpark give you is a fully functioning web content management system (CMS) which conveniently happens to understand surveys and panels. It is HTML- and PHP-based, browser-independent and, following best web practice, rigorously separates presentation from function. In an attempt to make it a little less complex, rather than having to write any PHP code, most text content can be written in Smarty, a text mark-up system. This makes it easy to pull fields from the panel database for display and put logic into the text too.

It’s a highly accomplished implementation of a CMS and you could certainly use this software to build big fast-moving content-rich sites in which the survey activity was only a small component. It is a clever stance to take, though the trade-off to all this flexibility is the time and expertise required to create a new site. This will not let you pop up a new community in a couple of hours. To be fair, the people at Globalpark recognise that only a minority of customers would be able to do the configuration from scratch and tend to quote for doing the initial configuration work with new customers.

Version 7 also introduces a number new Web 2.0-style community building blocks. Forums allow you to create threaded discussions, with members contributing responses or, optionally, defining new topics too. Whiteboards let you create a simple single-topic forum. Blogs let you turn the commenting over to your participants, who can add their own content and upload images, documents and so on. You can also feature selected blogs on the home page. Chat lets you hold one-to-one or group discussions in real time, to a limited extent, though stops well short of a full online group.

You can restrict access to forums and all the community components, so you can work with an invited subset of members only. Whenever content upload is an option, you can restrict the files you permit, e.g. only to allow JPEG images or Word documents, and the size can be limited too. It’s all very sensible, but it does not really jive yet for the qualitative researcher wanting to pull panel members into open, semi-structured research. There is no built-in workflow in the way there is for a quant survey and your data is likely to end up scattered all over the place. This needs more thinking through, and no doubt later versions will improve the situation.

However, praise must go to Globalpark for providing these features and making the software entirely DIY, if you have the skills to do the CMS configuration work behind the scenes, because many other community tools do not give you this degree of control or flexibility. You could do a lot of novel and interesting community-based
and collaborative research with what this offers.