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Discussion forums — creating community on your site
By Ellen Agger
May 28, 2001

Ask family members of the 110,000 Canadians who will develop Alzheimer Disease or a related dementia this year alone what challenges they face with this devastating disease and how they cope. Or better yet, visit the bilingual discussion forum on the Alzheimer Society of Canada (ASC) web site to learn firsthand what’s on caregivers’ minds.

This forum — The Care Exchange/Caregiver Forum — has been an important feature of the ASC site since its launch in 1997, providing a place for caregivers (family and professional) to find a sense of community, feel less isolated and problem-solve together.

Here are a few things to think about if your organization is considering adding a discussion forum to your site.

A word about terminology

You’ll see a variety of terms used to describe ways that Internet users can communicate with each other: discussion forums/message boards, chat rooms, mailing lists/listserves, web conferencing.

We use the term discussion forum to mean the part of our web site where visitors can post and reply to messages on a message board. Forum visitors can visit any time that’s convenient for them and post messages of any length about any topic that’s of concern.

Chat rooms let users participate in "real time" — messages are usually short and only visible on the screen during the chat session, although they can be archived for later reading.

Mailing lists/listserves are e-mail-based discussion groups where subscribers to a list can send messages to all other subscribers.

In recent years, some of these forms of online communication have been combined in one place: visitors may read a message board, opt to also receive postings to the board by e-mail or participate in a chat session. This may be called web conferencing, although this term is also sometimes used to simply mean discussion forums.

Benefits of discussion forums

The Alzheimer Society provides information and support to families across Canada through a network of provincial and local offices, and support groups. The national web site and the forum extend this work through the Internet, bringing information and support to a much wider and larger audience.

In choosing to offer support through an interactive forum, we looked at the many benefits of forums for our web site visitors. Consider the particular needs and situations of your visitors when assessing whether to add a forum to your site.

For the Alzheimer Society of Canada, a discussion forum:

offers a place where visitors can connect with other people in similar situations, learn from their experiences and establish online support relationships

is accessible from anywhere in the world — any time of day or night (of particular benefit to often over-stretched caregivers)

lets visitors remain anonymous if they feel more comfortable doing so

is particularly useful for people who live outside communities that offer support groups, who prefer the immediacy of using this medium and to those who may have an affected family member living outside their own community

The benefits of offering a forum to our expected visitors were clear from the early planning stages of the ASC site. We felt that by providing a forum, we would be offering a sense of community to our visitors through a central place on the site where they could go when it suited their busy schedules. As well, the maintenance requirements and staff resources to host a forum were lower than for those of a mailing list or chat room.
Is a forum right for your site?

If you’re considering adding a forum, you’ll need to make a number of decisions.

Look at your goal: If your goal is to provide a sense of community and a way for your site visitors to interact with each other, a forum is one good option. But consider who your visitors are and what they need — would a mailing list or chat room better meet their needs? Look at this in the context of the following considerations.

Resources: You’ll need a programmer or web designer to develop the forum and troubleshoot any problems that arise. You’ll also need a staff person or volunteer to monitor the forum and take action if there are any problems. Costs for a forum vary from free (see point #5) to several thousand dollars, depending on the complexity and the number of forums required.

Moderated or unmoderated: In an unmoderated forum, visitors can post messages directly to the message board without having them approved first by a moderator. This is the route ASC chose because it’s more immediate for the visitor and requires less work on our end. However, there are risks associated with this. (link to Minimize the risks of problems below). To minimize problems associated with these risks, we monitor the forum daily and remove inappropriate messages as needed.

Registration: If you want to gather information on who posts messages on your forum, you can require that visitors register first to get a username and password. We assessed our target audiences and decided against registration because it would pose a possible barrier to a group that is already dealing with high stress levels and includes many new computer and Internet users. As well, it requires more work to administer.

Server space for the forum: If you have your own web server, you may be able to house the forum on it (depending on a variety of technical considerations). If your site resides on a server elsewhere (through an Internet service provider or web hosting service), you may be able to house the forum on that server. Contact the company where your site is hosted for further information. They may also offer services to help you develop the forum.

You can also arrange for the forum to be hosted through a specialized service that offers forum hosting. Or create a forum on one of the free services, such as Yahoo!Groups, and link to that from your site — the downside: you’ll lose the "branding" your site design offers and your visitors may not return when they leave your site for another one.

Usability: There are a number of options for forum design, including how the forum and messages are structured. Consider your visitors’ comfort level with computers and the Internet carefully when making decisions about the structure. Visit a variety of forums to see what’s available. Whatever you choose, it should be easy to use and offer instructions for new users.

Getting your forum going: You built it, now will they come? You may need to start some discussion threads to kick off your forum. From time to time, ASC staff participate in a discussion if we have useful information to offer, such as pointing to resources on the site that a visitor may have missed. Or we may reply to a posting if no one else has picked up on a topic to help stimulate discussion.
Growing your forum

When the message board becomes lengthy, you might consider archiving old messages on separate pages. This will reduce the amount of scrolling needed to read the message board.

Consider adding additional forums for new topic areas as the need arises or select a format for your forum when you first set it up that allows for separate discussion topic areas or "threads" — these serve as "mini-forums" within a forum.

As the ASC Web site continues to grow, we’re investigating several options that will offer more opportunities for discussion and interaction, including:

revamping our forum to take advantage of new technology that allows visitors to receive forum postings through e-mail

looking at the way our forum is structured to see whether it best meets visitor needs

adding mailing lists and/or chat rooms for particular groups of visitors, such as donors or people with Alzheimer Disease
Do you need policies?

Web policies are often developed when problems arise. Before that happens, consider the following and make the rules clear to visitors and to those involved within your organization:

Will you allow advertising for products or services on your forum?

Will you allow postings inviting forum visitors to help an individual, company or organization with research or information-gathering?

Who will make decisions about "problem" postings?
Minimize the risk of problems

Cyberspace has opened new worlds to non-profits. It has helped us reach much wider audiences and do our work in new ways. But it also has opened organizations to attack by individuals who can wreak havoc on your Web site and forum. You can minimize your risks by:

always backing up your site regularly, including the forum, in more than one place

monitoring your forum daily and removing inappropriate postings

adding filters that can weed out inappropriate language, such as swear words and hate messages, from forum postings
Related links:

Alzheimer Society of Canada forum — The Care Exchange/Caregiver Forum:
http://www.alzheimer.ca/english/forums/intro.htm (English)
http://www.alzheimer.ca/french/forums/intro.htm (French)

Article on building online communities: Community Connections: Using Technology to Further Your Mission by Maggie Leithead, VP, CharityVillage
/cv/research/rofr13.html
More on building online communities and links to forum software — many of the software sites have links to examples of forums using their software:
http://thinkofit.com/pubs.htm
Yahoo!Groups:
http://groups.yahoo.com/
Ellen Agger is Webmaster at the Alzheimer Society of Canada reach her at: webmaster@alzheimer.ca; www.alzheimer.ca