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 list has best practice advice for how you can get involved after you publish the tool.
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
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.