Ten years ago, organizations that wanted to start a website would often take the “Field of Dreams” approach: If you build one, they will come.

Today success on the web is far more complex. People expect websites to be informative, dynamic, and engaging. They might stop by once or twice to check things out, but probably won't return unless you immediately give them something of value.

Just like everyone else, EduGuide: Partnership for Learning has wrestled with the question of how to best engage our web audience. Our website already offers more than 500 articles, interactive quizzes, and soon, an Advice section where our members ask questions and share solutions. Yet we're still concerned about how well we will be able to engage our audience, particularly to reach parents and students.

So we developed a strategy to help predict how well the website will do after we've launched it. We came up with a plan to enlist a group of web users who would periodically test the major aspects of the website and send us feedback. This worked well for a while, but unfortunately this brought up a whole new question about engagement. How do we keep beta testers engaged enough so they will want to use our website and then provide us with their feedback on its tools and functionality?

The answer was to build up our group of beta testers into a community.  We knew we wouldn't be able to do this within our own website until all of our new tools had been completed. We also wanted the beta testing area to be consistent with just the right number of tools. So we picked a few free web tools that offered the right combination of capabilities. Each tool serves a purpose or helps to engage our beta testers.

Here are the tools we are using:

• Techsmith's Moraehas made it easier to capture data while we are observing users of our website.

• Survey Monkeyhas made it very easy to write, host and distribute our testing surveys via the web and email. It also tabulates the responses and displays them as bar graphs. We've used it a lot during our beta testing process.

• Ningallowed us to create a private social network where members can post questions about the EduGuide.org website, interact with other web testers, and participate in testing scenarios. Ning is customizable and includes most of the same tools that you would find on Facebook or MySpace.

• Scribd is the online home of the Web Advisors newsletter. On Scribd, visitors can post comments, share links to documents with their friends, enter a rating, and download a copy onto their hard drive.

• Facebook has been a great source for web beta testers. At first, it seemed extraneous to maintain a group on Facebook when we could already communicate with Web advisors via the EduGuide and Ning websites. But, we realized that the rules for the Internet had changed so much that we not only couldn't wait for people to come to us—we had to go where people already were. So we viewed our presence in Facebook as a “bureau” that would represent us in that social network.

At first glance, this might seem like a strange combination of different web tools and services. The truth is that there are so many ways to communicate right now that your best strategy is to pick the methods that are the most popular with your target audience. Facebook users who join our group in the Facebook social network can get the same information without ever visiting the Ning site. Users who enjoy the “old fashioned” approach provided to them by Scribd.com may not join Ning or Facebook, but can still read our information in newsletter form.

Contrary to the quote from “Field of Dreams,” it isn't enough to just build a website. We must go where the people are, talk with them, share what we know, and earn their trust. We need to bring the baseball game to them and invite them to play.

What are some ways that you have engaged your web visitors? Share your thoughts and stories as a comment to this post, or email me if you have questions about types of audience engagements that could work for your situation.

Check out the ways that we are engaging our EduGuide users with our Web Advisors Community. Visit http://www.eduguide.org/beta and register as a Web Advisor or take one of our surveys.