Traditionally, organizations use discussions to prompt engagement from their members, but in time they often become difficult to manage, with similar ideas and feedback spread across dozens of threads. This makes cultivating ideas time consuming and difficult.

Higher Logic Thrive Community (Thrive Community) offers the Ideation module, which is designed on a singular principle: soliciting and gathering ideas — and feedback on those ideas — from your users. The Ideation home page (shown below) is the centralized location in your community for this exchange, and discussion of, user idea suggestions.

• Users can organize their idea submissions in Categories that your organization has defined;
• Admins can keep users in the loop about their submissions via custom Status labels; and
• Users can vote on and comment on idea submissions to help crowd-source the best ideas.

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Common use cases

If you're wondering whether you can benefit from the Ideation module, consider the following use cases.

• User groups solicit product-feature ideas - Ideation gives organizations a central place to gather and nurture feedback to better align their product road map with user-requested ideas and features.
• Associations request event-session ideas for conferences - Ideation gives these associations an opportunity to deliver the sessions and content that their members want.

Ideation features & benefits

The Ideation module benefits the entire community by offering:

• a centralized location, the Ideation home page, where all ideas-related conversations take place
• a feedback mechanism by which all community users can express their opinion and thoughts on an idea

Admin benefits

• Admins can control who can view and submit ideas
• Admins can create custom Categories to organize ideas
• Admins can create custom Status labels to communicate what's happening with an idea
• Admins can customize the module's name to suit their organization (e.g., Product Feedback instead of Ideation)

User benefits

• When a user searches for ideas, the system displays existing, submitted ideas as the user types characters into the search field. The search function:
  • queries the titles and descriptions of existing ideas,
  • makes it easier to find existing ideas,
  • reduces the likelihood of duplicate idea submissions, and
  • has a link that users can click to post their idea, if they don't find an existing matching idea.
• Users can vote and comment on submissions
• Users can submit their ideas anonymously (if enabled)
• Users can include file attachments with their ideas

Ideation home page

Submitted ideas are displayed in a large "card" format, making them easily readable and digestible. Up to 12 of the most recent ideas are shown by default. You can click the page buttons at the bottom to view more, or use the search bar and various filters to focus the ideas shown.

The most important information about each idea displays on its card:

• title and description,
• who submitted it and when,
• its associated Categories and votes,
• its Status, and
• the number of comments.

Users can vote on an idea right on its card by clicking the thumbs-up or thumbs-down icon.

Ideation management

Users with Ideation-management permissions will see an ellipsis icon (...) at the top of the Ideation card and can use the options to edit, delete, pin, and change the status of an idea. Learn more about Ideation Settings.

NOTE: Higher Logic gives Admins the ability to "reindex" much of your community content, including Ideas. Reindexing is simply "refreshing" the content, similar to reloading a page in a web browser.

To learn about reindexing content in your community (e.g., who site can reindex content; which content can be reindexed), see Reindex Content Items.

Click the name of an idea to view its details page, where you can:

• edit your ideas,
• edit other people's ideas,
• view any associated comments,
• add comments, and
• mark a comment as the "Official Response."

Mark as Official Response

As users read through idea submissions, they can comment on them for numerous reasons, such as to request more information and to add their support.

Users who have Ideation-management permissions (via the Who can edit ideas? setting; see Ideation Settings) can also mark a comment as the "official response."

NOTE: Only one comment per idea can be marked as "official."

To mark a comment as "Official Response":

1. Navigate to the idea that you want to edit.
2. Click the pencil icon of the comment that you want to mark as the "official" response.
3. On the edit dialog, check the Mark as 'Official Comment' from an Administrator box.

NOTE: This permission is no longer exclusive to Admin users. The ability to do this is controlled by Security Group membership.

4. Click Save.

The comment moves to the top of the Comments list for that idea and displays the Official Response bubble.

Notes

The Official Response checkbox option remains available for the other comments for that idea.

If a different comment is subsequently marked as "official":

• that comment moves to the top of the Comments list,
• it assumes the Official Response bubble, and
• the supplanted comment loses the "official" designation and returns to its original position in the Comments list.

Ideation and Moderation

Ideation is user-created content and, as such, is subject to your site's or an individual community's Moderation settings.

• Moderation Notifications & Settings details site Moderation settings and how to configure them in your site.
• Manage Your Site's Moderation Queue provides information on how moderation works and managing moderated content.

Integration write-backs

If your Higher Logic site is associated with a third-party integrated database, some of the activities in your Community can be written to that database during the standard activity-sync process.

• Navigate to Settings > External Content > Activity Sync in the Admin interface in order to manage writeback activities on the Subscriptions tab.

To learn about the activity-sync process, see Member Activity Sync.

Related articles

• Ideation Settings details how Admin users can configure Ideation.
• Ideation Statuses provides information on how to set up and manage statuses for idea submissions.
• Ideation Reports