Connected tools: Bulletin boards

Bulletin boards allow for asynchronous threaded discussions over a longer period of time involving more participants. Participants can return to topics and react to each others' comments while research moderation is low to medium. Discussion boards are most useful for getting opinions about a specific event, topic or stimulus.

When use this tool?

• Bulletin boards are useful for communication campaigns to track and capture comments before, during or shortly after a promotion (e.g. ad campaign, PR or other marketing event). This is especially useful as a qualitative communication tracker in sync with a quantitative test.
• Brand or product usage experiences (e.g. immediately after purchase or launch) can also be shared and discussed effectively on these platforms.
• For customer satisfaction studies bulletin boards are excellent to elicit critical incidents (e.g. people's most positive or negative experience). In combination with quantitative studies for example customers who rate an experience as really bad or extremely good can illustrate their rating on a bulletin board.

For business-to-business studies bulletin boards can be used as well as professionals may provide their ideas at their own convenience from every place. Bulletin board applications are also used in quantitative studies to offer participants the opportunity to provide additional comments outside the scope of what the research has foreseen. This enriches the descriptive findings of the underlying quantitative study and is more motivating for participants.

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