Communities are the last place people describe problems in their own words at length. That makes them the best qualitative source available and the easiest one to spoil, which is why this task type is read-only and says so at the top.
What to put in the public brief
- The topic or problem area, not your brand
- Which communities or platforms, or that the worker should find them
- The language and market
- That the task is read-only, explicitly
- The output format you want
Keep your brand name out of the public brief. It changes what a worker looks for.
What to put in the private instructions
Give the question, not the search terms
"How do people describe the moment they gave up on doing this manually" produces better reading than a keyword list.
Ask for quotes with links
Paraphrase loses the vocabulary, and the vocabulary is most of what you are buying. Five real sentences beat a page of summary.
Ask what surprised them
Someone reading a community cold notices what a person inside it stopped seeing years ago.
Restate the boundary
No posting, no commenting, no voting, no messaging anyone. Say it here as well as in the public brief, because this is the instruction that must not be missed.
Proof worth requiring
Ask for
Quoted passages with links, grouped by theme, plus which communities they searched and which turned out to be empty. The empty ones are useful too.
Do not ask for
Screenshots of private groups, direct messages, or anything behind a membership wall they joined for this task. If it is not publicly readable, it is out of scope.
When this task type is the wrong tool
If you want to ask a question rather than read one, that is a survey or concept feedback, and both are honest ways to get an answer addressed to you.
If what you want is for a community to talk about your product, earn it. There is no version of buying that which survives contact with the community it targets.