Tools are an essential part of your online engagement strategy. They allow your community to engage directly with projects and allow you the freedom to consult openly with your participants. Tools display in tab containers below your project description so you can implement as many as you need to.
There are nine tools to choose from:
Forums: Create open discussions for your community to engage with you and each other.
Places: Allow your participants to identify and comment on places.
Ideas: Propose questions and gather ideas from your community.
Stories: Enable your community to submit their experiences using text, images, and videos.
Guestbook: Let your community comment on issues without prompting debate.
Questions: Create a space for your participants to ask you questions.
News feed: Keep your community informed about the project by creating news articles.
Surveys: Create detailed surveys to collect large amounts of information.
Quick polls: Ask quick and easy questions to measure sentiment and preferences. You can also use this tool as a widget.
When selecting your tools, we recommend only using the tools appropriate for your project. Think about the purpose of your tool and what kind of data you want to collect.
Add a Tool to Your Project
To add a tool:
Go to Projects > Projects and select your project or create a new one.
In the Tools tab, select Add Tool. If you have existing tools, they’ll be listed here and you can select Add a Tool to create more.
Select your tool from the list, Add a title, and select Create. Your chosen title will also create a Permalink; you can edit this if necessary.
Configure your tool’s details and settings, then Save.
Select the eye icon to preview and test your tool – any submissions you make in draft mode won’t be saved.
Select the pen icon to edit the tool. We recommend only making small changes to fix errors. If you need to make major edits to tools, consider how these will affect your reporting.
You can use the pen icon next to the tool's name in the tool list to change it.
Use the drop-down menu to Publish your tool if it's ready to go live, or Schedule it to publish from the three dots menu.
Your tools will display on your project in the same order you view them in the admin; drag and drop them in the Tools tab list to change their order. Similarly, multiple instances of the same tool can be reordered by dragging and dropping them in the list.
Once a tool is published, you have these options:
Unpublish your tool to take it back to draft status for significant changes or if you want to hide it from participants.
Archive your tool to stop receiving submissions. This will close the tool to participants but still allow them to see submissions to open tools.
Delete your tool to remove it from your project completely. A tool can’t be deleted if there are any submissions; you cannot recover it once deleted.
All tools have their own configuration options; you can find detailed instructions for each in the Tools collection of this help desk.