Your nation's website is the perfect hub for communication with and among your supporters. Suggestion pages will help you facilitate conversation loops and create a sense of community on your website. Here are a few of the many ways to use this type of page:
1. Crowd-source ideas for your organization. Want to start a project based on supporter preference? Encourage people to submit ideas and vote on those already submitted. This is how our product issues and suggestion page works.
2. Allow supporters to submit questions and have staff members respond. Readers can then tag questions. We use this functionality for the NationBuilder FAQs. Note: you can use an FAQ page to create a page of questions and answers written by someone with control panel access, whereas using a suggestion page allows users to submit the questions and point people to provide the answers.
3. Create a 21st century forum. You've probably used a forum to connect with an online community and you may have wondered how to recreate the immediacy of those conversations in your nation. You can set up suggestion pages around different topics that are relevant to your organization and encouraging people to respond to suggestions, both by tagging them and leaving comments. This creates a user-friendly experience that doesn't force your supporters into late-90s web design. If you try this option and aren't satisfied with the results, add your voice to this forum suggestion.
4. Ask visitors to your website to submit stories about topics relevant to your organization or mission. In this guest blog post from Avoyer Group, Mason Herron talks about how to use this approach to create an interactive discussion among journalists and writers.
Learn the nuts and bolts of creating a suggestion box.
