There are four main reasons to invite your audience to vote:

Your staff is crunched for time. You want to make sure that the stories you spend time reporting are the right stories to be spending time on. When you receive several high-quality questions that all pass your editorial judgment, rather than just picking one that you think your audience will be most interested in, you can have your audience tell you what they want (no need to guess!). 

Not everyone has a question to send to your newsroom (or they need to see lots of examples from other audience members to get going). So by inviting their votes, you're giving them another way to have a voice at your editorial table. It can also let even more people know about the opportunity to send in questions. It takes a little bit of promotion, but you can engage hundreds more people in the voting rounds than the number who sent in questions.  

When a reader votes for a question, you can choose to ask them if they'd like to be emailed the answer to that question, should it win. By doing this, by the time the answer publishes you'll have a list of people (in addition to the question-asker) who are likely to read and share the story. 

You can use the voting embed as another opportunity to collect email addresses for your newsroom’s newsletter, if you're inviting people to leave their emails after they vote. 

Here's a good checklist to consult while vetting your questions before putting them in a voting round:

If you like a question, but are not sure if the answer to a question would be possible to even get, we recommend vetting the question before putting it into a round. Basically: see if there's a story there. Do a little Googling, make a call or two and see if there's enough " there there" before alerting the question-asker that you'll be reporting it, or before placing it into a voting round. If it’s answerable but might take long - consider whether it's worth a larger project.  

If it isn’t definitively answerable - ask whether it could generate a broader conversation that's still valuable. Here’s an example from Curious City.

Are you able to add more insight than a Wikipedia answer or what is already common knowledge?

Sometimes questions about a very specific thing (E.g., one particular intersection) can be illuminating and relevant even if you've never been there or seen it, other times questions can be too specific to be relevant for an entire audience (E.g., why does this one school have a statue for this one person in the auditorium?).

Does this story seem like it’d be great for a particular medium (video, prose, photo, audio, infographic, or otherwise)? No need to decide final products at this point - just keep it in mind and you may want to assign or partner with a particular person to produce whatever final product may best present the answer. 

We believe curating a voting round like making a good mixtape. You want to make sure the questions are either of a similar tone, similar scope, or similar size. For instance, you likely wouldn't put an epic 14 minute heavy metal song right next to a 3 minute sappy love song right next to a jock jam on a playlist. So don't put a meatier question (E.g., How did the school district become so segregated?) up against a question that might be lighter in tone or scope (E.g., Where do all the bunnies go for the winter? or How much does the city spend on ornamental planting each year?). 

It's also good practice to only choose questions for voting rounds that you believe your audience would be interested in getting answers to, as there's a chance any question you curate into a voting round could win. 

While it's not the end of the world if a story wins and there's not a hard and fast answer to be found (it happens), it's less satisfying for everyone involved.

We've seen outlets sometimes take on questions that have no real answer, but still make for an interesting discussion or story nonetheless. Here are a few examples: 

The length of voting rounds is entirely up to you and your outlet. The longer a voting round is live, the more likely it is to get votes. But depending on your readership, their return rate and where you're placing the voting embed, they might wish they had opportunities to vote more often.

We've seen media partners have voting rounds up for anywhere from a few days to a few weeks. There's no magic number for how many votes a round should receive before you declare a winner. The point of the voting rounds is not to scientifically measure your audience's curiosity. Rather, it's an opportunity for them to have more say in the editorial process and to give you more validation that the stories you report already have a built-in audience.

You're more likely to get votes if you let your audience know that you're taking votes on their questions. We recommend posting a message to vote and linking to the page with the voting round on it from Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc. -- any properties you keep a social presence on. It can be effective to snap a screenshot of the voting embed to let people know which questions are in the running.

If you work for a broadcast outlet and do on-air promos, doing a short promo with people asking the questions that are up for a vote can be very compelling, too. Make sure you also state the URL for where they can vote!