Engaging participants in forecasting involves a thoughtful, multi-faceted approach. There's no single "right" way; success comes from combining different tactics that appeal to a range of motivators and drive behaviors. Here are some of the key ways to keep participants motivated, connected, and contributing on a regular basis. 

1. Foster Ongoing Communication

• Keep the conversation alive: One of the most critical ways to engage forecasters is creating a feedback loop about the forecasting efforts. Regularly share updates, insights, and results with your community. Use blogs, emails, or internal newsletters to highlight forecasting outcomes, interesting trends, and notable predictions. When the crowd gets something right or when newsworthy events affect open questions, make sure everyone knows.
• Loud and Often: Celebrate wins, spotlight accuracy, and share relevant news. The more you communicate, the more forecasters feel valued and part of a community. Highlight crowd predictions, accuracy trends, and leadership discussions to remind participants that their input matters.
  

2. Leadership Visibility and Influence

• Leadership Sponsor: Secure a senior leader or respected thought leader as a public sponsor for your forecasting initiative. Have them comment on the project, send messages, or participate in discussions. This signals organizational commitment and encourages broader participation.
• Champions or Ambassadors: Establish a network of enthusiastic supporters - "champions" or "ambassadors" - who can motivate others. These individuals can organize team "forecasting meetups" (in person or virtual), coordinate off platform activities, and promote forecasting among peers. 

3. Analyze and Share Insights

• Turn Data into Stories: Use the platform's reporting tools (.csv files) to give you insight in to what's happening on the site. Combine this with demographic insights to uncover new trends or challenge conventional wisdom. Share these findings with your community to spark discussion and demonstrate the value of collective intelligence.

4. Rewards and Recognition

• Recognize a Range of Behaviors: Don’t limit rewards to accuracy alone. Celebrate participation, insightful comments, upvoted contributions, and creative question submissions. Use leaderboards, badges, and public shout-outs to highlight different achievements.
• Cash Incentives: We don’t think cash incentives are necessary to drive lasting participation and gain accurate forecasting, yet gift cards to a local coffee shop or prize drawings can be fun short-term incentives. For example, if your aim is to do a quick participation push, say you need more forecasts ahead of a big leadership meeting, consider a prize drawing for anyone who submits a forecast during a specific time period (e.g., 24-hours). 
• Soft Incentives Matter: Don't underestimate the power of “soft incentives.” Typically teams have never had the opportunity to express themselves about business decisions, forecasts, etc. They’ve never been asked. For many people, this is a powerful incentive itself. Also, once you’ve gotten people to participate initially, you should reinforce crowdsourced forecasts as a new way of working, and encourage people give their input regularly. If a boss or manager is invested in this, they will be too.
• Profile Your Forecasters: People enjoy learning about their fellow forecasters and the techniques of those who are doing it consistently well. Feature your most accurate or active forecasters in Q&As, video interviews, or testimonials. Share their techniques and stories to inspire others and build a sense of community.
• "Pro" or "Elite" Status and Perks: Over time as you establish a small cohort of top forecasters, consider recognizing them with an elite status. For example, some clients after running forecasting efforts for one year, identify their most highly ranked forecasters as "Pros" or give them branded names like "Foxes" or "Elites". Besides a neat name and a badge, consider how this group can continue to develop their forecasting expertise by offering perks, like training, access to senior leaders or special events, compensation, or networking opportunities.

5. Integrating Forecasting into Business Processes

• Bring Forecasts into Meetings or Decision-Making: Discuss forecasting results at meetings, use the reports and API to extract interesting data, begin presenting the crowd probabilities alongside your "official forecasts," etc. We have a client who is the COO of the company - he talks about the results of the crowdsourced forecasts at weekly status meetings; a great way to keep people's interest.

• (For the Tech Savvy) Widgets and Visibility: Use the platform’s API to create widgets for intranets, emails, and articles. This increases visibility and keeps forecasting top of mind across the organization.

6. Forecaster Learning and Development

• Teams for Collaboration and Learning: Use the platform’s team features to group forecasters by department, project, or interest. Track and compare team performance, and recognize top teams in communications or at company events. Teams encourage peer learning, mentorship, and healthy competition, all of which foster a sense of belonging and accountability.
• Topical Challenges for Skill Building: Design challenges that last from a few weeks to three months, with questions relevant to the challenge period (e.g., quarterly business outlooks, product launches, industry events). When the challenge ends, display a leaderboard to recognize top performers and teams. To maximize participation, promote challenges both on the platform (through platform announcements, creating cms pages, or a blog) and off the platform (through emails, internal newsletters, and team meetings).
• Other Peer Learning Opportunities: Encourage teams to discuss forecasts, share strategies, and learn from each other’s reasoning. Facilitate forums or discussion groups where forecasters can exchange tips and best practices.

7. Keep Questions Fresh and Engaging

• Mix Time Horizons: Ideally, your questions should be a mix of long-term and short-term, or all short-term time horizons. By having some or all of your questions be short-term (3-6 months), users are more active on the site because things are current, and they can more quickly see how they did on the leaderboard (leaderboards don't populate until a question resolves). If questions are too long-term (longer than 8 months), people will place their initial forecasts and never think about it again.
• Release New Questions Regularly: Launch new questions regularly to keep the content of your site fresh and give people a reason to come back. Returning to the site encourages people to update forecasts on older questions. Additionally, having a variety of questions increases the likelihood that participants will find something of interest.
• Run Non-Business "Fun" Questions: This has been especially helpful when people are first starting out. Supplement the business questions on your site with newsworthy non-business related questions that everyone can relate to. Something about a TV show or a sporting event. That way people will feel much less "risk" when they forecast for the first time and will learn how to get around in the application without it seeming so serious. You should keep these kinds of questions going throughout the project, to keep people interested.
• Crowdsource Question Submissions: As the administrator, you have control over what gets published on the site. Let people create their own questions and see what happens. You may find this grassroots approach creates a more robust set of questions than if you are just creating them yourself. 

Additional Tips

• Rotate Tactics, Celebrate, and Collect Feedback: Combine different engagement strategies over time to keep things fresh and appeal to a variety of motivators. Don't forget to mark key achievements and anniversaries with special events or communications. And last but not least, gather feedback from your participants! Regularly ask forecasters for input on what’s working and what could be improved.

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