Social media

Forums

An online forum is an online space where anyone can join and contribute to a discussion, typically around a specific topic. There are a large number of open forums on the internet addressing everything from technology to motherhood.

You can include a forum as part of your own online presence or you can participate in an online forum established by someone else. Organisations can also use forums internally, for example to allow team members to easily and informally collaborate on projects or share knowledge. Forums can provide faster responses than using email and allow all participants to follow entire threads of discussion.

An example of an online forum

Type of forum

Your organisation may wish to identify existing forums, established by other people or organisations, that are relevant to your work. This allows you to join a ready-made community that is already interested in the issue relevant to your organisation. You can then contribute your own thoughts and see what other people are saying, for input into future business strategies.

Alternately, your organisation may wish to establish your own online forum to:

• conduct ongoing question and answer sessions for customer support and queries regarding your activities, products and services (like a help desk)
• encourage user groups to form and interact independently to share their experiences about your activities, products or services (for example, online gaming communities)
• encourage broader community engagement and interaction on issues that go beyond the organisation’s core activities (for example, an organisation focusing on water conservation can encourage their users to converse on broader, but inter-related, environmental topics).

If your organisation chooses to establish its own forum, you can integrate it into your website or use a third-party hosted solution.

One likely challenge in establishing your own forum, as a new place for people to engage with and discuss your organisation, is letting people know that it exists and attracting participants. You can promote it by linking to it prominently on the homepage of your website or through other marketing initiatives such as links from emails, online advertising and social media sites.

Before establishing your own forums, you may need to plan your internal resources to support it. If your forum is popular and successful, it may require dedicated internal resources to respond to queries and comments and to moderate content posted to the forum.

Moderation policy

When establishing a forum, you may also want to make sure that you manage the expectations of your customers, supporters, donors and the public more generally, and set clear guidelines about what conduct is suitable and appropriate for the forum, and what conduct is not. Set a moderation policy – clear guidelines about what conduct is suitable and appropriate for the forum, and what conduct is not. Manage your forum according to this moderation policy. In addition, you may ask members to register to be able to access and participate in your forum, or may consider using Captcha, which is a program that requires a user to enter a code word to access the forum. Use of registration and Captcha are likely to dissuade people from posting comments that are spam or black hat SEO.

Moderating posted content requires care. To gain the most out of your online engagement, it is considered good practice to only use your right to moderate content only for clearly inappropriate behaviour, as defined within your usage policies, or behaviour that breaks the law. Trying to moderate constructive criticism or even angry comments about your organisation often leads to stronger and more strident criticism, and attracts more attention to the criticism. It is considered good practice to address any criticism that is posted to your organisation’s forum in an open and positive manner. If you do not address it, or you chose to remove such a post, the problem might escalate, and the post could find its way to other sites beyond your control.