Online Community · UK public procurement notice

There are many things the tendering agencies need to consider when developing their

proposal:

• The online community has been used to carry out multiple types of research projects, both

qualitative and quantitative in nature. Typical methodologies include questionnaire-based

surveys, focus groups, polls, photo competitions, in-depth interviews, vox pops, virtual

discussion forums, and ethnographic studies. Our new platform needs to be able to deliver a

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similarly varied range of methodologies to provide the most appropriate solution for our

projects.

• Tendering companies will need to:

o Work alongside the YW Insights team to design the research projects and ensure the needs

of the business are met.

o Conduct recruitment for the online community on a regular basis to ensure there's a

consistent sample of customers which aims to be as representative of our customer base as

possible.

o Moderate the online community to ensure any queries or complaints by members are

addressed and shared to YW in a timely manner.

o Provide output in the form specified by the Insights team. Reports need to be engaging and

must provide feedback in the form of insight-led recommendations.

In addition to regular tasks, the community also does the following engagement work:

• Engages with customers through the 'Lounge', which is a discussion room where customers

can post questions and start conversations with each other.

• Occasional 'engagement' tasks where customers can share pictures or details about

themselves and receive rewards.

• We also have monthly newsletters outlining all the work that was done on the community

that month

• 'Close the Loop' posts every 6 months where we provide updates on the projects that were

conducted and the impact they had. We also take that chance to reward the most active

members as a way of thanking them for their support.

Requirements

Objectives for the community include:

• To build and maintain an online community platform branded to Yorkshire Water (YW).
• To design and conduct high-quality research projects in conjunction with YW and provide

robust insight for the business.

• To provide customer insight to support our business planning processes in addition to

regular and ad hoc research requests from the business.

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• To provide an engaging and fun place for customers to engage with YW and allow them to

share their opinions about decisions that will affect them.

• To deliver reports in an engaging format to allow internal stakeholders to improve

understanding of our customers and make decisions based on customer insight. Data tables

and transcripts should also be provided where applicable.

• To ensure vulnerable and hard to reach customers are included in the community including

markers for customers on our Priority Services Register and financial support services (e.g.

WaterSupport).

• Continue to engage with customers in a wide variety of ways to ensure engagement and

satisfaction with the community remains high and allows for a high response rate to our

projects.

• Provide innovative solutions to address sampling issues to ensure sufficient representation

of all groups. Note: young people have always been underrepresented on the online

community. Proposals should therefore consider ways to improve representation of this

group or provide alternative methods of engaging with this group on a consistent basis (e.g.

external boosts for specific projects where representation is important).

• Ability to deliver to different timelines for surveys, discussion rooms, focus groups, polls,

video diaries, and other task types - some of our work is very fast turnaround, the agency

must have the capacity to meet the needs of fast turnaround pieces of work.

Note: Community sample must be broadly representative of the Yorkshire region, taking into

account age, gender, location in the region (North, South, West, East), SEG group. However,

we understand that responses will vary, so sample per project may be different to the desired

proportions