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. 

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.