Community Suggestion Forum

A Community Suggestion Forum is a digital inbox for community feedback and proposals that allows people to vote for each other’s proposals, leave comments and discuss ideas. It’s primary purpose is to engage the user community without overwhelming customer support or product managers. The forum allows users to provide feedback and have a feeling of being heard, but it does not place the burden of replying to each individual proposal on customer service people.

Generally, a Community Suggestion Forum is relatively open, and allows community members to see the ideas that other people have posted previously and to comment on them. Users can usually express their support for other people’s ideas, usually with voting, thumbs-up or emoticon reactions. Comments allow for discussion and idea refinement, and can sometimes involve members of the product management or customer support team.

On the administrative side, a Community Suggestion Forum allows product managers to spot trends, hot ideas and to notice topics that many users are interested in, complementing past product research and informing future research and development ideas. Forums usually allow product managers to communicate with users interested in a specific idea, to send out surveys, organise focus groups, or generally provide feedback and get notified about related development effort.

To manage collecting ideas in an open forum more effectively, community suggestion forums usually have de-duplication and merging functions. For example, when a user is trying to post an idea similar to an already existing topic, the forum submission tool would offer to up-vote the original idea instead or add a comment on it. When administrators notice that several ideas are similar, they can join them together, merging the comments and existing votes.

As with any other open forum that hosts user-generated content, spam is a persistent issue, as is content moderation. Good community suggestion forums make it easy for administrators to fight spam, stop and prevent abuse at scale.

How does a Community Suggestion Forum differ from a discussion forum?

The primary goal of a Community Suggestion Forum is to gather community feedback, ideas, and proposals for products or services. It focuses on structured suggestions that users can vote on and discuss, whereas a discussion forum is usually meant for broader conversations, questions, and topic discussions that may not necessarily lead to actionable changes.

Community Suggestion Forums often include features specifically designed to facilitate voting on proposals and ideas, such as up-voting, thumbs-up, or emoticon reactions. This helps highlight popular suggestions and prioritize community desires. In contrast, discussion forums usually focus more on threaded conversations without the same emphasis on voting or ranking ideas.

While discussion forums might see occasional involvement from product teams or customer support, a Community Suggestion Forum is specifically designed to be a bridge between users and product managers. It helps product teams spot trends, understand user priorities, and potentially communicate back to the community about ongoing development efforts or plans.

How does a Community Suggestion Forum differ from a petition site?

A Community Suggestion Forum typically offers multiple ways for users to express support (voting, reactions, commenting), whereas petition sites generally rely on a single metric: the number of signatures. This means that forums can provide a richer sense of community sentiment and priority beyond a simple count.

In a Community Suggestion Forum, users can actively engage in discussions, provide feedback, and refine ideas through comments, allowing for collaborative idea development. On a petition site, the primary action is signing a petition, which is a one-time, static form of support without room for dynamic interaction or conversation around the proposal.

Suggestions on a Community Suggestion Forum can evolve over time as users discuss and improve upon initial ideas, often resulting in a more refined and actionable proposal. Petitions, on the other hand, are typically fixed in wording and intent from the start, with the goal of gathering support as is, without modification.

Community Suggestion Forums encourage ongoing engagement by allowing users to return, comment on updates, and participate in further discussions as the idea progresses. Petition sites usually conclude once a goal is met or a deadline is reached, with limited follow-up interaction or updates to the supporters.

How does a Community Suggestion Forum differ from a suggestion inbox?

In a Community Suggestion Forum, all submitted ideas are generally visible to the entire community, allowing everyone to see, discuss, and vote on them. A suggestion inbox is typically private, with ideas directly submitted to the administrators and are not publicly visible to other users.

In a Community Suggestion Forum, the community can help prioritize ideas through voting and feedback, providing a clear indication of which suggestions are most popular or urgent. A suggestion inbox relies solely on internal review processes, making it harder to gauge community consensus or interest in particular ideas.

A Community Suggestion Forum often allows for ongoing updates and responses from the development team or moderators, creating a dynamic feedback loop. In a suggestion inbox, feedback is typically one-way; users submit ideas, but they may not receive any follow-up or know the status of their suggestions.

How does a Community Suggestion Forum differ from a product support site?

A Community Suggestion Forum is centered around gathering and discussing ideas for future product enhancements, new features, or strategic changes. In contrast, a product support site is focused on resolving current issues, providing troubleshooting help, and answering user questions about existing features or problems.

In a Community Suggestion Forum, the engagement is proactive, encouraging users to think creatively and contribute ideas for product evolution. A product support site is more reactive, addressing the immediate needs of users and concerns related to current functionality or technical issues they are experiencing.

The content on a Community Suggestion Forum is focused on proposed ideas, potential new features, and community-driven innovation. In contrast, a product support site mainly contains knowledge base articles, FAQs, troubleshooting guides, and solutions to known issues.

In a Community Suggestion Forum, administrators play a role in facilitating discussions, gathering insights, and potentially providing updates on the consideration or implementation of suggestions. On a product support site, the role of support staff is to provide direct assistance, solutions, and guidance for resolving user problems.

How does a Community Suggestion Forum differ from a bug tracking tool?

A Community Suggestion Forum is designed for capturing a wide range of ideas, including new features, enhancements, and general feedback. In contrast, a bug tracking tool is specifically focused on identifying, reporting, and managing software defects, technical issues, and errors.

Community Suggestion Forums are open to a broad audience, encouraging all community members to contribute creative ideas and proposals. Bug tracking tools, on the other hand, are primarily used by testers, developers, and sometimes advanced users who have identified specific issues in the software.

Bug tracking tools require detailed, technical documentation of the issue, including steps to reproduce, expected behavior, and logs or screenshots, facilitating the debugging process. A Community Suggestion Forum, however, focuses on high-level ideas and user experiences, with less emphasis on technical details.

Bugs reported in a bug tracking tool often need urgent attention as they can directly impact the functionality, performance, or security of a product. Suggestions in a Community Suggestion Forum, while valuable, are typically less urgent and focus on future improvements rather than immediate fixes.

Suggestions in a Community Suggestion Forum often go through a process of community discussion, refinement, and prioritization, but they may not have a formal workflow for resolution. Bug tracking tools have a structured workflow with statuses like “Open,” “In Progress,” and “Closed,” ensuring that issues are tracked systematically from identification to resolution.

How does a Community Suggestion Forum differ from an idea bank?

An Idea Bank has similar goals to community suggestion forum, but they generally differ in the level of openness and workflow management features. A community suggestion forum generally allows anyone to add an idea. An idea bank generally allows anyone to propose an idea, but has one specific person in charge of adding ideas (and they can reject or park proposals). A community suggestion forum tends to foster discussion between community members, and helps push important topics to the surface. An idea bank tends to contain only topics that are already relatively important, and helps the product managers prioritise, select and perform further research on those topics. A community suggestion forum might not have any specific workflow support for ideas, but an idea bank generally supports at least assigning statuses to ideas and driving further research and refinement.

### Combining a Community Suggestion Forum and an Idea Bank

A community suggestion forum can serve as a good initial filter for an idea bank, so the two methods can be combined quite effectively. The wider community can propose ideas and discuss them openly, and the ideas that have generated enough support can transition to an idea bank.

How does a Community Suggestion Forum differ from a Research Engagement Platform?

A Community Suggestion Forum is primarily aimed at gathering and discussing user-generated ideas for product improvements, new features, or general feedback. It is community-driven and focuses on influencing product development through user creativity and feedback. A Research Engagement Platform is designed to facilitate structured research activities like surveys, interviews, focus groups, and user testing, with a focus on gathering in-depth insights and data for research purposes.

In a Community Suggestion Forum, participation is open-ended and spontaneous, with users contributing ideas and voting or commenting on previous proposals according to their interests and available time. A Research Engagement Platform usually involves targeted invitations to participate in specific research activities, often guided by research objectives and methodologies determined by the organizers.

The content of a Community Suggestion Forum is generally open for users to see, discuss, and refine. The content in a Research Engagement Platform is often restricted, with research results available only to product managers and research organizers. Research activities are more structured compared to open discussions, often with predefined sessions or activities that conclude once the data is collected, offering less opportunity for back-and-forth interaction between participants.

Research engagement platforms often offer more complex back-end reporting and data processing. A community suggestion forum will generally allow administrators to inspect individual discussions, see overall statistics and check individual user engagement, but not provide complex statistical reports and assist with producing conclusions. The back-end of a Research Engagement Platform is often filled with detailed research data, reports, or insights gathered from the structured research activities, which are then used to inform product strategy or design decisions.

Users participate in a Community Suggestion Forum to share their ideas, voice their opinions, and see their suggestions implemented in the product. Participation in a Research Engagement Platform is often driven by invitations to contribute to specific research studies, sometimes with incentives or the promise of influencing the direction of product research more directly.

Combining a Community Suggestion Forum and a Research Engagement Platform

A community suggestion forum can be a good way to users who are interested in a specific topic to participate in further research, so it can be a good way to seed the Research Engagement Platform with the appropriate audience. Although research engagement platforms may have a way to provide a research population from external sources or competing product audience, combining a community suggestion forum with a research engagement platform is a great way to increase relevance and trust in the audience.

Related and complementary tools to the Community Suggestion Forum

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