Ideation - Ways to implement/Best practices

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 

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