Some sites like Yahoo Answers, the Microsoft Developers' Network, Amazon.com product reviews and Yelp reviews, rate members based on frequency or helpfulness of their suggestions or reviews.

Is there a way to track how many times a site viewer emails a given profilee, after having searched using the pulldown menus? For example, after having searched for "Faculty Mentoring" in the pull down menu, a site viewer might use the contact info on the Profiles site to email a potential mentor. Ideally, the Profiles site would track frequency of emails (via Profiles) to a particular mentor, generated from this type of search.

This profilee would have a "Mentor Outreach Rating" which would show, say, three maximum stars for three or more emails. This would be similar to those crowd sourcing and review community sites which rate users based on, and thus reward members for, frequency of postings. This would encourage profilees to update their narratives and other text fields (on which "Faculty Mentoring" seems to base its search) to include info on "mentoring". It would also add visibility to the mentoring services offered by profilees. 

Similarly, if the site tracks the number of emails to a profilee, generated by (after) a search for "Global Health" (by specific country), we could roughly equate the number of email transmissions to a number of potential collaborations resulting from this search. The site would then generate a rating (three stars/three or more emails) for "Collaboration Outreach".

In each case, we would make it clear that the rating is based only on number of emails generated. Since many UCSF investigators are so metrics-driven, having a transparent measure of outreach efforts might encourage profilees to maintain and update their Profiles frequently. This would be a free and very user-friendly way to increase the visibility of, and traffic to the Profiles, while simultaneously rewarding profilees for frequent site visits and updates.