Managing and Facilitating your Tools | EngagementHQ Help Desk

When choosing your tools, you should always choose based on which tool is best for the consultation. However, you should also take the level of involvement into account. For example, if you have no time to respond to the questions, using the Q&A tool may degrade the trust between you and your participants.

Some tools require you to actively participate and manage them and you should always remember that reporting on your tools and sharing project outcomes is an essential part of community engagement.

This table has best practice advice for how you can get involved after you publish the tool:

Tool:	Admins facilitate:
Forums	New forum topics Discussion facilitation via comments and replies. Comments from admins appear under your username and with a blue banner.
Places	Submitting admin pins, if necessary
Ideas	Reviewing ideas Posting admin ideas, although this is not essential
Stories	Accepting or rejecting submitted stories. This could be a large workload if you have a high level of engagement and submissions. Comments, if enabled.
Guestbook	Post comments, although this is generally unnecessary
Q&A	Drafting and publishing public answers Updating publicly answered questions Drafting and sending private answers
Newsfeed	New articles Comments, if enabled, and you want to encourage discussion about a specific article.
Surveys	Adding hard-copy responses, if necessary
Quick Poll	N/A

Remember that a large part of community engagement is reporting back to your community. While some of the tools have less of a workload than others, the work of collating, presenting, and implementing your reports is essential.