I’ve started to do a weekly community digest via Email Campaigns, but I don’t know if it’s really moving the needle on that front (the use case is more around all the updates, etc, and hopefully some users click the links to help with open questions.)

Your idea to do it for a subset of users who can help out sounds like a good tactic to try. 

No real gotchas on Email Campaigns other than you have to do them by hand for now. Tho there was something on the recent AI webinar about making this easier to do in the future. 

My best advice for improving question reply and answer rates is outline in the article below. It’s really moved the needle, driving us into the upper 80%/low 90% range for the past few months (after a solid 1.5 years >80%).
 

Another tactic you could consider, I built a custom Open/Unanswered Questions page with Custom Pages. Then I redirected the out-of-the-box URL to that page via a Third Party Script. 

Here’s the breakdown: 

• Left (large) column

  • Featured questions (that article in my last reply) via Dynamic Content widget, filtered on a specific Public tag, plus custom background to make it stand out a bit.
    • If there are no open questions, the widget won’t show, pushing the next one up to the top. 
  • Open Questions via Dynamic Content widget, sorting it differently (by publish date) than the ootb page (sorts by last activity)
     

• Right (sidebar) column

  • Questions without replies via Dynamic Content widget, using the checkbox for questions without replies, plus custom background to make it stand out a bit.
    • If there are no open questions, the widget won’t show, pushing the next one up to the top. 
  • Recent Answers via the Solved Topics widget

​@DannyPancratz love the idea to setup a webhook to keep tabs on unanswered questions will be setting that up for sure! 

We are just getting our community going so a one off email is probably fine now but as we grow we’ll certainly need some automation to help support that and get people involved so those automations will come in handy.

Thanks for showcasing your custom page it does look very nice and informative, that is on the todo list as well!

​@DCampos We’ve been experimenting with exactly this method in our power user program! We use the email campaign tool to send a daily digest to the user segment comprising the various tiers (as labeled by user ranks) in the program. While anyone in the community is of course welcome to participate in any post, this is an action we promote and incentivize in this program. We’ve seen mixed results - a few takeaways for you below:

• It seems to be most helpful for users who are new to the program. It’s a helpful handhold that orients folks to the community and points them to exactly where we need their help. 
• More tenured members seem to ignore the email entirely (based on open and click-through rates) and find the specific posts that they can/want to contribute to on their own. I’m glad that they’re not dependent on the email to find them, but I of course am concerned about over-communicating and causing them to tune our messages out entirely. We’ve not yet refined the email send to only those community members who find it useful/just for a limited period of time as they’re getting started. Based on how we have this set up, I suppose we could limit the segment to only a handful of the lower ranks.
• After creating the first email “template”, it’s been straightforward to re-use the HTML and simply update the posts. However, we’ve found choosing those posts to be manual and time consuming, and also imperfect. Sometimes, after we select them and send them out, they’re answered by another user in the meantime.

I ultimately am in favor of the approach that ​@DannyPancratz described for several reasons, and why we’re also investing much more heavily in a similar “dashboard” of unanswered posts:

• It's totally automated. The posts (of your choosing) just appear without you having to select them. 
• It reduces emailing, which I think is almost always a win :) 
• It’s there for whatever user wants it, when they want it.