This morning for an hour or so all UserVoice forums were unavailable.
The reason for this outage was a bug that quickly ate up our database disk space. The monitoring system we use should have warned us of this issue, but did not do so until it was too late.
Once we were notified we quickly freed up space and addressed the bug, and there should not be any more issues stemming from this.
We'll be checking settings on and re-evaluating our monitoring system today, as this should have never ended up with an outage. Immense apologies for that - we will make changes to ensure this doesn't happen in the future.
If you have any questions feel free to leave them here or email me directly.
Thanks,
-Evan Hamilton
Community Manager, UserVoice
evan at uservoice dot com
Owners are important. Owners of UserVoice accounts are the only ones who can change billing information. So if the person who originally set up your UserVoice account is leaving the company/taking a sabbatical in Europe/the moon, you're going to want to make sure you have someone else set as the owner.
How do you make someone else the Owner of your UserVoice account?
Here's how:
1. Go to Settings
2. Go to the Admins tab
3. Click the gear icon to the right of the person you want to make into an Owner
4. Choose "Edit privileges"
5. Make the person an Owner
If the original Owner is leaving the company, you'll then want to edit their privileges and set them to None.
And you're done!
Sending people away from your product or marketing isn't a sin. In fact, it might get you more customers.
There's an irrational fear in older companies (or those run by people with older sensibilities) of "other websites". Those of this mindset feel that everything is a potential distraction, and you must keep people laser-focused on giving you money.
Wake up. Your potential customers already know that there are other sites on the web. They probably know about your competitors. They know that there's a new episode of 30 Rock three clicks away on Hulu that is more entertaining than your ...
Hey there UserVoicers,
Today we’re proud to announce the release of three new UserVoice features: an iPhone SDK, a Facebook app, and our brand-new API. The goal is to make it easy for you to ask your customers for feedback from wherever they are, without having to send them to your UserVoice forum.
These features have been in beta for the last few months, and we’re proud to say that Hootsuite, Ubank, and Payvment are already sporting the Facebook app tab on their pages. Cardmunch and Zipongo recently launched new versions of their iPhone apps including the UserVoice iPhone interface. ...
I’ll get right to it:
UserVoice is now 5X more likely to keep your customers engaged and active, and our email open rates are higher than industry standards.
Let me explain...
Earlier this year we launched a new sign-in system. We spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to remove the barrier of account creation to interact on a UserVoice forum less arduous, but still capture an email so you could keep your customers in the loop. It wasn’t perfect. You all exposed plenty of bugs and oversights, some of which we’ve fixed and some of which we haven’t. (Thank you for that, by the way!)
The big concern with the new system was that those who had previously contributed anonymously wouldn’t engage because the new system requires an email address. Thankfully, our testing shows this not to be true.
Despite the fact that voting now requires the extra step of signing in, we’ve seen a negligible change in the % of visitors who vote.
The new sign-in system is still unobtrusive enough for those who want to contribute without signing up for an account.
Of course, we didn’t change the system for nothing. The goal was to capture email addresses for everyone who contributes on your forums, so that you can keep them engaged and plugged into what you’re doing when you update the status of ideas.
This has been an exciting success - we’ve seen a 5X improvement in the % of voters who provide an email address (not including SSO users, as that’s a different beast) from 15% to 72.5%.
So, now that you’re capturing more emails, are people opening them? We have good news on that front too.
UserVoice notification emails have rather high open and clickthrough rates when compared to the standards of the industries we serve.
|
Status Type |
Open Rate |
Clickthrough Rate |
|
Under Review |
37% |
14% |
|
Planned |
36% |
10% |
|
Started |
36% |
12% |
|
Completed |
29% |
8% |
|
Declined |
27% |
7% |
For comparison, here’s some data from our friends at MailChimp (whom we highly recommend for traditional newsletters and the like)
|
Industry |
Open Rate |
Clickthrough Rate |
|
Education |
26% |
5% |
|
Government |
27% |
4% |
|
Internet/Web Svc. |
20% |
6% |
|
Software |
18% |
3% |
|
Technology |
21% |
3% |
(there are certainly other industries on that page with comparable rates, but only a few, and they’re not the industries that UserVoice generally serves)
Of course, this requires you actually respond to ideas. Keep an eye on our tips and tricks series to learn more about responding to ideas. We’ll also be rolling out some changes in the future to help you keep better track.
The bottom line: UserVoice is now 5X more likely to keep your customers engaged and active regarding your company. We might even be more effective than your mailing list!
Thanks for your support, your help fine-tuning the new sign-in system, and your constant feedback. Keep it coming - you make us better so we can help you make your business better!
Rock on and understand your customers,
-Evan Hamilton
Community Manager, UserVoice
evan at uservoice dot com
Every time a government program launches and people complain about its implementation, we hear the same thing: “well, there was a public comment period - why didn’t you say anything then?” Of course, very few of us ever seem to hear about these public comment periods when they’re happening. They happen with small groups of people who have the time to hear about and attend such meetings, and end up being a nuisance for government and non-representative of the citizenry at large.
The United States Interagency Council on Homelessness (USICH) took a unique approach to the public comment period and got unprecedented public interaction by encouraging digital commenting and discussion of their plan.
Challenges
Leading the United States’ first ever online national policy discussion on homelessness meant that USICH had a powerful opportunity to build a plan that would affect the daily welfare of millions of Americans. Jason Kravitz, Director of Communications for USICH, knew that public feedback was key, since the it was vital to acquiring full input from the agency’s key stakeholders and those who actually experience the tragedy of homelessness. The trick? USICH only had 3 weeks for public comments. While scheduling a number of physical discussions with stakeholders across the country, USICH knew that they needed to hear from more folks than they’d reach in person. The traditional method for online commenting - emails and web form submissions - just wouldn’t do. Aside from the time crunch with the plan due to Congress and the President in a matter of weeks, USICH wanted to give the public an opportunity to have a comprehensive discussion on the issue. The traditional form of public comment often does not allow for a dynamic discussion or debate, and that wouldn’t work for such a major issue with such controversial solutions.
Wisdom of the crowd
Inspired by the Department of Housing and Urban Development UserVoice forum, USICH set up fsp.uservoice.com. “It streamlined the process immensely,” said Jason. “It allowed everyone to contribute, from advocacy groups to service providers to state and local government officials to citizens who experienced or were at risk of experiencing homelessness.” With all the talk of listening to “constituents”, USICH managed to get actual, readable, recorded feedback from the folks they were trying to help. Many of the people profiled in the plan actually got to lend their voice to the discussion. That’s powerful.
Promoting in the right places
Of course, just having a better system doesn’t mean that people will automatically get involved. USICH got tactical and reached out to the channels with direct connections to the homeless. In the age of Web 2.0 (or are we on 3.0 now?) we forget that the key to marketing is knowing where to market, regardless of how shiny or new it is. USICH took out ads in the 8 homeless publications with the largest circulations, and asked homeless services providers to tell their members. Instead of the mysterious public commenting period we never hear about, those with the most at stake had the message delivered directly to them.
Focusing the conversation
Government isn’t traditionally known for spending much time on looks or design, but USICH used design to ensure they didn’t generate an aimless conversation. While the simplest way to focus the conversation on your forum is to simply change the question prompt, USICH took it to another level and used our custom design option to build extremely visible conversation buckets that visitors could click into. When you visit their forum, it’s clear what questions they’re trying to answer. This level of clarity increases engagement, especially when dealing with populations who may not be immensely computer literate.
Conclusion
“The result was tremendous,” Jason told me. “We expected folks to comment, but we never expected this level of participation.” In their 3 week window for public comments, USICH had 2000+ users post nearly 700 ideas and contribute 600 comments to the conversation. Jason said that many of the ideas and comments confirmed what they were hearing from its regional meetings, but more importantly it provided the agency with additional context and color to provide when discussing these plans. The Federal Strategic Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness was released at the White House on June 22nd.
We salute USICH for bucking the traditional and actually involving the public. Their goals to end veteran and chronic homelessness by 2015 and family, youth, and children homelessness by 2020 are valiant ones, and we look forward to seeing this true representation of democracy used to help those in need.
This is how you build an incorrect password notification.
No, I’m not trying to turn this into a design blog. I just want to give Meetup total kudos for having one of the few good “incorrect password” messages ever:
Meetup knows that I’m busy (going to meetups!) and understands that I probably have a lot of accounts online and can’t remember A) if I actually do have an account with Meetup, B) what email I used for it, and C) what password I used for it. They clarify that I do have an account attached to that email but that my password is incorrect. They even kindly remind me that ...
