In addition to simple contests, CommunityCOUNTS provides tools for running your own asynchronous online mixed-media forum, including structural attributes aimed at compelling full answers from your respondents. These tools can be added to your site with a simple cut and paste and at a very reasonable cost. In fact, if you are an elected official or you’re willing to put up with inline advertising, forums can be implemented for free.

The idea here is to provide small media outlets, bloggers, and public officials with an affordable, easy-to-use platform for community engagement. The key to this is the Q&A forum format. Just set up a forum and copy the embed code of your choice onto your site. Let your visitors know what you expect, and get them submitting and voting on questions. How frequently and under what conditions you decide to promote questions to be answered is up to you. You could take the top question every week or one of the top three every month. Maybe you just take the top ten after two months. It’s up to you. Once a question is “promoted,” you can link respondents’ replies to the question, and if an answer isn’t present, visitors can use our nudge feature to email would-be respondents.

After a question has been answered, you may ask the community to vote on the responses to signify if they believed them to be fair. They are not asked if they agree with the responses. Rather, they are asked if a question was in fact answered. In this way, a communityCOUNTS forum provides a structural incentive for respondents to actually answer the questions put to them.

A communityCOUNTS forum is your turnkey solution to the emerging asynchronous Q&A forum format. It leverages sites such as YouTube and MySpace Video to meet your audience where they already are while providing the added value of a well-defined integrated forum structure. For more information contact us or  create your own free forum.