Question & Answer is a powerful tool that allows users to ask detailed questions and receive official answers. It empowers users to reach out and engage with your project and allows you to position your organisation as responsive, informed and authoritative.

Questions are displayed as a list, with answered questions appearing with a tick. These answers are expandable, reducing visual clutter and enabling visitors to navigate long lists easier.

Rather than responding with a faceless official account, you can post responses from official representatives, each of which can have their own profile and avatar. These are displayed under the Who's Listening? tab.

On the back end, you can choose to add categories for questions, turn participant voting on, display respondent biographies and allow users to filter by category. From the front end, you can choose to answer questions or flag them as duplicates.

🖼️Example

Provide a short summary of your question.

You have 150 characters left

Provide detailed information relating to your question.

You have 500 characters left

Select a respondent from the list that you would most like to answer your question.

Moderation Policy

These are the people that are listening and responding to your questions.

Craig Fish

Director of Planning

Craig is a professional planner who has lead a number of teams on city-transforming projects.

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{{question.description}}

{{ answer.respondent.name }}
| Edited

Answer this question

Select the respondent who will be marked as answering the question

Provide the answer to the question. Answer can be saved as draft and published when complete.

No questions found

⚙️Settings

Settings

Basic

  • Activity Status - allows the user to set the Question and Answer tool to either an active (on) or inactive (off) state. Active Question and Answer tools will accept contributions, whereas inactive Question and Answer tools will not allow contributions to be submitted. Inactive Question and Answer tools will display a notification to visitors advising them that the activity is closed.
  • Activity Title - gives the Question and Answer tool a title that is used to identify the activity in the Reporting area of the Dashboard. This can also be used to create a user prompt or question.
  • Display Title - optionally displays activity title. The activity title will also be used in the confirmation notification sent to any contributors (if enabled), regardless of whether this option is selected.
  • Activity Description - provides a description that can be used to provide further information about the activity, including leaving internal notes to other users.
  • Display Description - optionally displays activity description.
  • Activity Dates - allows you to input the closing date of the activity. This is currently only used for reporting purposes and does not automatically open/close the activity.

Activity

  • Respondents - Adds the ability for participants to select from a pre-defined list of respondents they would prefer to answer their question. Also enables the display of respondent biographies and avatars to provide detail on who is listening and responding to the questions. Available respondent settings are:
    • Name - the respondent's name.
    • Position - the respondent's title, position, qualifications etc.
    • Description - a short bio or a run-down of who the respondent is and their involvement in the project.
    • Image - an avatar for the respondent.
  • Categories - allows participants to select from a list of categories to classify their contribution. This also allows visitors to sort contributions by category and is reflected in reporting, allowing you to sort contributions by category in your evaluation.
  • Member attributes - adds pre-defined Member Attributes to the input form of the Social Map to collect participant information. Member Attributes are defined at the sitewide level, and allow the collection of standardised user information that can be reused later.
  • Participant Voting - determines whether participants can vote on contributions from other participant.

Display

  • Allow users to filter by category - enables user to filter by category if enabled.
  • Display respondent bios - displays the respondents’ details to visitors so that they can see who is listening and answering question.

Advanced

  • Registration Required - sets whether a participant must be a registered member to make a contribution or may also be an unregistered visitor. If enabled, this will override the registration defaults set at the sitewide level.
  • Moderation Method - allows the moderation method to be changed between post-moderation (default) and pre-moderation. Adjusting the moderation method will override the moderation method settings set at the sitewide level.

Notifications

  • Contribution Notifications - enables notification emails to be sent to the nominated users when a contribution is made.
  • Referral Notifications - sends an email notification to nominated users when a contribution is referred to by the System Moderator.

🎯 Key Actions

Key actions

  • Under the Activity tab, select New Respondent.
  • Input the Name field and optional Position, Description and Image fields.
  • When complete, select the blue Save button.
  • Under the Activity tab, turn the Categories function to On.
  • Type the category name into the Category Name field.
  • Select Add.
  • You can delete categories by selecting the delete/trashcan icon on the right hand side of each category.
  • Under the Activity tab, turn Participant Voting to On.
  • To set the voting method, select from Upvote or Upvote & Downvote in the Voting Method dropdown box.
  • Select the tricolon (⁝) icon on the right hand side of a question.
  • Select Answer this question.
  • You will be presented with the Answer this question field below the question.
  • Select a respondent from the drop-down list.
  • Input your answer into the provided field.
  • To send your answer live, select Publish.
  • To save your answer in draft, select Save.
  • To cancel your answer altogether, select Cancel.
  • You can edit, remove or unpublish a question any time.

💡NOTE: The user will receive an email notification that their question has been answered.


  • Select the tricolon (⁝) icon on the right hand side of a question.
  • Select Flag as duplicate.
  • The question's colouring will be changed to red and a flag symbol will appear in place of the question mark.
  • To unflag the question, repeat the steps above and select Unflag as duplicate.

Viewing results and reports

You can access your results and view reports for a Q&A activity by going to Dashboard --> Reports --> Results. Click the 'View Results' link next to the relevant activity name to view the report.

Information in the report is filtered by the date range, which you can adjust at the top-right of the report.

To get further information about any reporting metric, hover over the question mark at the top-right of the reporting component to view a description.

Summary

The 'Summary' section of the report provides the following information:

  • Key statistics - shows a number of top-level metrics relating to the activity including:
    • the number of contributions (questions) posted in the activity
    • the number of unique contributors who asked at least one question
    • the total number of questions asked in the activity
    • the number of questions marked by admin users as duplicates
    • the total number of times questions received a vote
    • the average number of votes received per question
    • the total number of views all questions received
    • the average number of views received per question
    • the total number of answers provided by admin users
    • the total number of questions that remain unanswered by admin users
    • the total number of times answers received a vote
    • the average number of votes received per answer
    • the average response time to answer a question.
  • Sentiment - a bar chart showing the overall sentiment analysis of all posts in the activity, classified as either 'positive', 'negative', 'neutral', 'mixed', or 'unclassified'. This information is determined by Site Users by applying the text analysis tools.
  • Tag word cloud - a word cloud visualisation showing tag (theme) analysis of all post content, with the size of each tag determined by the number of times the tag was used. Tags used more frequently display at a larger size in the word cloud than those used less frequently. This information is determined by Site Users by applying the text analysis tools.
  • Tag table - a table showing the number of times (count) a tag was used in the tag analysis and the percentage of times that tag was used as a proportion of total tags.
  • Question voting - a chart showing the overall results of the voting activity on questions. The visualisation type will depend on the voting method used in the activity (e.g. upvoting or upvoting/downvoting).
  • Answer voting - a chart showing the overall results of the voting activity on answers. The visualisation type will depend on the voting method used in the activity (e.g. upvoting or upvoting/downvoting).
  • Answers by respondents - a bar chart showing the number of answers provided by nominated respondents.
  • Answer voting by respondents - a bar chart showing the average vote score received by respondents.

Featured contributions can also be added to the summary report by nominating them in the 'Analysis' section of the report. This will add the entire question and answer content to the report to highlight content that is particularly interesting, important or representative. Up to 20 contributions can be featured.

The summary report can be exported as a PDF by clicking the 'Export' button at the top-right of the page.

Overview

The 'Overview' section of the report includes high-level meta-information about your activity including information about whether participants were registered members or anonymous, when the activity occurred, what devices and browsers were used by participants and a breakdown of selected demographic information (for member participants only).

This report is standard across all participation tools. More information can be found in the Reporting section.

Data

The 'Data' section of the report includes the raw data collected through the activity, shown as a table and map.

The data table for the Q&A activity includes the following information:

  • Contribution ID - a unique identifier for the post
  • Date submitted - the date the post was made
  • Question - The main question asked by a participant
  • Question Details - Additional text added to the question by the participant to provide further information or context
  • Category - the category nominated for the question as selected by the participant
  • Question Upvotes - the number of upvotes a question received
  • Question Downvotes - the number of downvotes a question received
  • Flagged - whether the question has been flagged as inappropriate by other participants
  • Answer - the response to the question provided by the admin user
  • Answer Respondent - the name of the person who responded to the question
  • Answer Upvotes - the number of upvotes an answer received
  • Answer Downvotes - the number of downvotes an answer received.

Additional fields containing the personal information of the participant may also be appended to the data table.

Data from the data table can be exported by clicking the 'Export' button at the top-right of the page. Data can be exported as either CSV or XLSX.

Data can be filtered on a number of attributes by clicking the 'Show Filters' button at the top of the page and adjusting the values. Any filters applied to the data table will persist in the data export.

Practice tips

  • This tool works best when real people are used as respondents with avatars, rather than an organisation or team name and logo.
  • Setting the tool to pre-moderation will ensure all questions are moderated before being set live. However, we do not recommend this as it can undermine trust and give an appearance of a lack of transparency as people's questions will not appear straight away.
  • This tool should be accompanied by clearly-written content outlining your approach to assessing and answering questions. This will allow you to set and manage people's expectations around responses.