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The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Business, Finance, and Careers > How would you set up a "how to budget" bulletin board?
 
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Knyteguy
Jul 6, 2005

YES to love
NO to shirts


Toilet Rascal

Old Fart posted:

I know you can only lead a horse to water, but so many of my coworkers are living paycheck to paycheck. I work in a somewhat large service industry company and most employees make about 1.5x to 2x minimum wage. I want to take over one of our informational bulletin boards and at least try to help.

How should I go about this? What are good ways to get someone's attention and make getting out of the cycle an attainable goal? I want to make it attention-grabbing, non-judgmental, but easy to grasp and execute. Something that can offer at least some short-term results to keep people interested.

I'm by no means an expert. I didn't even really understand what a budget was until my late 30s, and even now I'm no MMM. I just feel like there's gotta be a way to let people know they're not alone, there's no shame, but there is a way out.

Suggestions?

1) TheAdminZone.com - this site is all about running a forum. It covers how many forums you want to actually have (you don't want to start off with as many as SA has for example, usually 2-3 is a good number until you absolutely need more forums on a certain topic).
2) A forum software. vBulletin used to be the standard (what SA uses), but there are lots of great contenders now. Invision Power Board, phpBB, etc. Definitely do some research here. You mention taking over something so maybe you already have this covered.
3) Some tenacity. Building an online community is really difficult. There are plugins for vBulletin at least that let you post as other users. You pretty much want to start driving fake conversations between users yourself. This gives an appearance of an active community and social proofs your site. If you're not going to run it as an income source this may not be too difficult.

If you have any specific questions I could probably help a little bit. I've run a couple relatively successful forums with upwards of 5,000 users (and made decent money off of it), and lots of unsuccessful ones too.

Edit: vvv Oh. Well now I feel like a jackass if that's the case. Don't have any suggestions there.

Knyteguy fucked around with this message at 06:46 on Oct 10, 2014

* # ¿ Oct 10, 2014 06:36
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The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Business, Finance, and Careers > How would you set up a "how to budget" bulletin board?