Best Practices and Lessons Learned on Running an EPA Discussion Forum

Marketing

When people display a lot of hand-wringing about the uncertainties created by this new project, point out that it’s not uncharted territory: OPA and now OSWER are doing similar projects, and the results have been positive (or, at the very least, the worst fears have not been realized).

Make sure that OPA is in the loop early, and not just the Web people – make sure that the higher-up press people are afforded adequate time to digest the idea.

Make your forum is as interesting to your audience as possible; this will encourage participation. Someone not immediately associated with the content should to review the questions to make sure the writing appropriately uses ‘plain language’.

Do everything you can to advertise the discussion forum.  Getting regular participation is a challenge in order to promote the forum’s existence, consider your marketing tactics:

• Notify your stakeholders via more conventional methods: email, mail or at meetings/conference calls on the availability of the discussion forums

For the general public and general marketing, use:

• EPA news release (promote your usage of FB, Twitter, and blogs)
• EPA home page banner (link to primary discussion forum)
• EPA Tweet (establish and promote your Twitter hashtag)
• Greenversations blog post to help your launch. Craft an informal blog post that can be posted on Greenversations, Facebook and elsewhere. The post should include the following information:
• Who you are and what you are doing. Be candid that you are experimenting with new ways of gather public input on an EPA rule/program.
• The discussion forum URL and a discussion hashtag for Twitter.
• Note that you intend to read (but necessarily respond to) all comments posted on the discussion forum.
• The timing of your launch blog post should be considered. Anecdotally, the Greenversations post for the Clean Water Action plan was done on late Friday afternoon, which enabled that post to stay in the “Greenversations blog latest entry: ” section of the EPA home page until Monday. Surprisingly, Friday and Saturday there were over 1K views each day on the clean water action plan discussion forum, by Monday, it had dropped to 800.
• Consider using the blogging community to help you market your forum.

Comment Moderation
Take some time to think about your comment policy. OPA’s comment policy for Greenversations is very good – you may ultimately decided that you agree with what OPA has already come up with and only need to alter it slightly to apply to your forum. The key to the comment policy is to make it comprehensive – you want to be able to say to belligerent commentors: “As outlined in our comment policy…”

Base your policy on the Greenversations comment policy. You can borrow language from the ‘Terms of Participation’ at http://datagov.ideascale.com/

For approving/deleting comments, have a backup moderator at all times. Have a backup for the backup, just in case. Build a schedule for your moderators to make sure the comment review is not accidentally overlooked.

Realize that responding to belligerent/non-germane comments via e-mail works. Don’t directly delete a comment, but rather send an e-mail explaining why the comment was not published and offer them an opportunity to re-submit their comment in a publish-able form.

Remind people that if someone asks a tough question and we give an honest, forthright answer, we look good. Criticism of EPA is out there whether we respond to it or not; disengaging from the public does not diminish criticism of EPA.

Technical Tips

In Wordpress, you will use the “Greenversations template”. This will give you a quick professional look and common set of EPA Web design elements, plug-ins and structure. Jeff Morin did the blog banners in the past, so he is a good resource on that issue. David Eng has/had a workgroup to provide a “standard base” template with features now.

If you’ve never used Wordpress before, take some time to learn it. It’s not the most intuitive application.

If your are using the IdeaScale platform instead of Wordpress (which hasn’t been tried at EPA as of 1/2010), you have to moderate comments after-the-fact. Different discussion forum platforms will have differences in terms of how and when comments are posted.

Other Observations

The stats for the CWA discussion forum average about 730 comments/day, with a total of about 148 responses. A “table of ideas” document was published to summarize the comments received and EPA’s response to them. The affiliations of the commentors is shown and in just skimming the doc, it seems that those received by the “public” were, in general, not useful to EPA on this topic.

http://www.epa.gov/compliance/civil/cwa/actionplan/ideas-responsestable101509.pdf

Links to Discussion Forums

http://blog.epa.gov/oswerforum/
http://blog.epa.gov/cwaactionplan/
http://blog.epa.gov/enforcementnationalpriority/