Ideation - Ways to implement/Best practices

Hi Mihir we have done it a couple of different ways and have seen our clients do it even differently... 

Mihir said:

• What are the ways you have implemented ideation? Did you create ideation for each of the individual communities or did you find that having Ideation as a separate community is more useful?

This really depends on your users and community(Site): 

1. If you have a bunch of groups that are not related to one another - if your audience is specific to each group (membership, permissions, etc) 
   1. We would recommend creating idea application(s) in each group
2. If you have a whole bunch of groups that relate to one another - if your audience is not specific to certain groups(Product A, Product B, etc) 
   1. We have created ideations in our main community(site) and within our community(site), we have a designated ideations group within our community 
3. Another example is we have structured it as an "Ideation Event" where we are looking for content and looking for processes (as we have all hands on deck) - a scheduled event that is for example once a quarter. 

Mihir said:

• Did you customize the ideas creation interface?

For some of our clients we have customized the nomenclature to be more specific for the audience 

Mihir said:

• Any challenges with managing ideas inputs from customers - customers could potentially confuse product feedback with support requests or something else. 

There may be challenges, but what we recommend is: 

• Setting expectations that an idea will not automatically be a part of your product/ service and there are some that will never be appropriate
• Seeding with the type of ideas you are looking for to give an example to your users and kick off the ideation submissions 
• Taking advantage of the ideation statuses
• Setting expectations with users as to how to submit an idea (we have done prefilled forms before - almost like a template that users can fill in) 
  

Mihir said:

• Any prompts you designed to encourage better/more detailed inputs from customers?

We tend to designate a call to action to submit ideas (maybe a brief description around it) and a designated ideation event. 

Thank you, Sarah. This is going to be super helpful as we set up an ideations forum in our community. Its clear to me that there are various approaches and we will have to decide internally which way to proceed. We have another place we use to manage ideas and as we migrate that content, it will serve as a seed/suggestion to users around what is acceptable as an idea. Great inputs and thank you once again. 

Hi Mihir, I generally agree with a lot of what Sara Collins , but wanted to add a few tips from my own experience:

• "What are the ways you have implemented ideation? Did you create ideation for each of the individual communities or did you find that having Ideation as a separate community is more useful?"
  
  • I initially had one ideation per product-level group, but it became hard to manage and also left a lot of ambiguity for the situations where something could count toward two (or more) different products. It also made it hard to manage since Ideas were in many different places, so if I were gathering a list to give to our Product Management team, I'd have to check multiple locations.
    I've since updated our functionality and merged most of the idea posts into one specific Ideation group, making it an easier 1-stop landing spot for people
• In addition to changing to one group, I also utilized the Catagories functionality to better organize these. This way, Product Managers or customers of one specific product can easily drill down. I also made categories required on the submission form, so everything is organized. 
• "Did you customize the ideas creation interface?"
  
  • No, but multiple updates on the UI of the group to help guide users, tying in with the setting of expectations of users and the process our team uses. 
• Ideas cannot be easily exported (at least in 11.x, I'm not on 12.x) to show votes and/or who voted, so you'll need to get creative to push this information to external systems or other non-administators. There are ways such as  Exporting All Ideas in an Ideation to Excel to do this, but its not an out-of-the-box report. I've had some success by going to Administration > Reporting > Content and filtering the group down to my Ideas group, then un-clicking the "Comment" filter on the chart. This gives all Ideas created in the given timeframe, which can be exported to CSV. 
• Finally, in my opinion, of the key pieces to making ideation valuable for your community is to ensure you have an internal process to properly triage, respond to, and keep up-to-date on your Ideas. Being able to set an expectation of "this is not going to be on the roadmap" is just as important as "thank you for your votes, we're releasing this next month."

You can see our Ideation group at https://sugarclub.sugarcrm.com/explore/product-suggestions/ or the one from this community (Ideas and Improvements ) if you'd like any practical examples. 

Thank you Alex Nassi. Regarding your first point, I am on the same page as well. I think its valuable to collect feedback around specific problem areas rather than products. Around the later points you make, I think its valuable to set expectations in the Ideation community about what is considered a well articulated idea - since those are more likely to be upvoted and therefore worked up on. 

Around setting expectations on whether an item will be picked up in a subsequent release, we are currently swaying towards integration with an internal tool our products folks use - so its seamless for them to flip a status, provide a comment and it travels back to the community and informs everyone. 

Mihir said:

so its seamless for them to flip a status, provide a comment and it travels back to the community and informs everyone. 

This is great, having that integration will make life much easier for everyone and will likely lead to a much better experience for your customers