Who is this article for?
🗣️ All researchers (both admins and users)
⭐ All Research Hub plans
Research Hub is a CRM designed for researchers. It helps you to build and manage your panel, so you can get valuable insights from users in a fraction of the time.
This guide will get you started launching studies, importing users, and organizing your panel. We'll include links to in-depth resources on specific topics along the way.
Guide to this guide
- Overview
- How to automate recruitment and incentives
- How to import and organize your users
- How to grow your panel
1. Overview: Meet your research CRM
This 2-minute video outlines the key benefits of Hub and gives a quick overview of how to use it.
2. Automate the not-fun parts of research
Research Hub replaces over 5 tools with a single solution that handles invitations, screener surveys, applicant tracking, scheduling, incentive payouts, and all the logistics that researchers don’t have time for. The best way to see Hub’s features firsthand is to launch a project. It's free and only takes a few minutes.
How to set up a project
🚀 How to launch a Hub project
1. Create a new project: Our project intuitive project workspace will walk you step-by-step through drafting your study.
2. Recruitment: Add participants to invite to your project by uploading a CSV or selecting users from your Hub panel. You can also wait until after you’ve launched your project to add participants. Optionally, add a screener survey to help filter participants or upload a document you need participants to sign.
3. Research activity: Add details about your study such as session location, session length, preparation instructions, and set up your scheduling and attendance rules. You can add collaborators during this step, or at any point during the project, and you can all sync your calendars to take advantage of automated scheduling.
4. Participant number and incentives: Fill in your target number of participants, incentive amount, and whether you’d like us to distribute incentives on your behalf.
5. Participant communications: Review all of the automated emails that will get sent during your project and apply email themes, template sets, and sender profiles for easy, on-brand communication.
6. Launch! You can continue to invite participants to your project, or go back and edit details about your project after it launches.
Main article: best practices guide for Hub projects
What participants see
Main article: The Hub participant experience
Hub makes research easier for you and your users. Participants can easily apply to your study and submit a screener. You can manually approve applicants one by one, or switch on auto-approve based on screener questions. Either way, approved participants can schedule themselves for time slots that fit your team's availability. If your study is a task participants complete on their own time, you can automate sending them instructions.
Your customers will experience Research Hub as if it’s an extension of your brand. There are lots of customization options, like branding, email templates, data consent notices, and domain authentication.
3. Import and organize your users
You no longer need to juggle spreadsheets, emails, scheduling apps, and customer databases owned by other teams. Instead, you’ll have a single source of truth to manage recruitment and participation in studies. Here's how to set up your Hub panel for success!
First, import your users to Hub (more tips here). along with any data you’ll find helpful for recruiting. The following types of data can be handy:
- Contact info: email, name, phone if needed
- Characteristics: job title, any relevant demographics
- Persona: new/active/churned users, or other ways you bucket your users
Research Hub is built to be flexible. Once you've imported your users, you can create custom columns in the database to store any kind of user data that’s important to you, and you can apply custom filters and labels to find the right participants for your study.
- Use filters to find the exact users you want to talk to.
- Set invite rules so that only certain users can be invited to studies. For example, you might want to prevent users who have recently participated from being invited to future studies.
- Add labels to more easily group users.
- Create segments to group and retarget users wo share characteristics.
💡 Hub tracks participation for you: who’s added to which studies, who participates, how they answer screeners, and how much they’ve earned in incentives. All this info is available as you filter your panel.
It's free to add up to 100 users to Hub. As your panel grows, you can upgrade to one of our affordable subscriptions.
4. Grow your research panel
If you’re starting with a small population of users, Hub can help you grow.
- Create opt-in forms to share in your website, app, or emails.
- Share an invite link to any study you've launched
More questions? We're here to help
If there's anything else you'd like to know about Hub, you can check out the full list of Hub support pages, or email projects@userinterviews.com with questions. Happy researching!
