Increasing User Involvement on your Forum

When you first start your forum, how do you build traction and get users involved?
If you have an existing forum, how do you increase and maintain user involvement?

If you are just getting started or aren't satisfied with your current level of engagement, here are some best practices to increase user involvement in your forum.

Install the widget on your website

Add the post idea widget to your site to make so that users can share ideas from where they are, here's how.

You’ve already done that, but you’re not seeing engagement?

• Consider having the widget auto-prompt users. More info here.
• Auto-prompting users will increase the touch of the NPS widget, so you won't be reliant upon the user clicking the widget manually to give a Net Promoter Score. A user who goes out of their way to leave an NPS will tend to be a vocal promoter or detractor, so auto-prompting will give you a more holistic sense of your users' satisfaction with your product.
• Use our .identify feature to pre-fill the widget with a user's email address, so they don't have to provide it manually. More info here.
• An email address is required to leave ideas, so doing this will reduce the step of a user providing their email address, and reduce the effort need to give ideas.
• Add the widget in additional places. For example, you can add the text “Give Feedback” in a drop-down to open the widget. Increasing the number of areas you have the widget implemented will increase the chances of users providing you feedback, as they won't need to navigate to a specific area and have their experience interrupted.

Collect ideas on behalf of customers

Create ideas around features customers have requested or even ones your Product Team is already considering or working on, to get the conversation started.

• Import an existing list of ideas. Here’s how.
• Add ideas via the UserVoice Admin Console. Here’s how. 

You can also leverage features to allow your customer-facing teams (Support, Sales, Customer Success) to easily capture customer's feedback in UserVoice. Learn more.

• It is easier for a user to support existing relevant feedback than creating it from scratch. By capturing customers feedback on their behalf, you will not be reliant entirely on your users using the widget or navigating to your web portal to leave feedback.
  
  

Respond and act on ideas

By responding to ideas, users see that their feedback is being heard. This motivates them to come back and share additional ideas because they can see how to communicate and get answers from Product!

• Look for quick wins - ideas you can implement now or are already in progress.
• Add statuses to ideas and include a status message to give more color. Here’s how. Even declining an idea and providing a reason why it is valuable to customers - it shows that you are listening.
• Add comments to ideas asking for more info from your users. Here’s how.

Optimize your feedback site for a frictionless experience

You want to make it easy for users to submit ideas because a low effort experience will encourage them to keep coming back to your forums.

• Make sure your forums and categories make sense to your end-users. You don't want them to have to think too hard about where to post their ideas. Check out our best practices guide here for additional guidance about how to structure your forums and categories.
• A welcome message on your UserVoice site will make it clear to your users how to use the feedback forums and set expectations. A welcome message can provide direction to your users to assist them in generating high-quality ideas. Check out this guide for examples of a welcome message.

Promote your feedback site

Link to your forum whenever you communicate with users.