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

Ideation is designed around the singular principle of soliciting and gathering user ideas and feedback from your Online Community members, all from a centralized location: The Ideation Home page. Users can organize their submissions in Categories your organization has defined, admins can keep users in the loop about their submissions via custom Status labels, and users can vote and comment on submissions to help crowd-source the best ideas.

NOTE: Currently, organizations can only have a single instance of Ideation, and access settings apply across your entire community site. In the future, you'll be able to have multiple Ideation instances (e.g., one for product updates, one for your organization's annual conference).

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Common use cases

Common use cases for Ideation include:

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

Main features

• One centralized location where all Ideation conversations take place - the Ideation Home page
• When searching for ideas, the system will display already submitted ideas as users type into the search bar. This helps to both make it easier to find ideas and prevent duplicate submissions about the same ideas. If a user doesn't see a suggested idea already submitted, they can click a link right from the search bar to post it themselves.
• Users can vote and comment on submissions, helping to crowd-source ideas and feedback
• Admins can control who can view and submit ideas
• Admins can create custom Categories to keep ideas organized
• Admins can create custom Status labels
• Organization can provide feedback on an idea (great idea! bad idea! Already in development)
• Users can submit their ideas anonymously (if enabled)
• Admins can customize this feature's name to fit your organization's specific use-case (e.g., Product Feedback)
• Users can include file attachments with their ideas

Ideation home page

By default, the Ideation Home page is located in the Browse menu of your site's Navigation bar:

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 is shown directly on its card for at-a-glance consumption, including its title and description, the person who submitted it, and when, its associated Categories and votes, and the number of comments. You can even vote on each idea right from its card by clicking the desired thumbs up or down icon.

NOTE: Users with Ideation-management permissions will see an ellipsis menu at the top of the Ideation card and can use the options to edit, delete, pin, and change the status of an idea. To learn more, see Ideation Settings.

Click an idea's name to view its details page. In addition to the information shown on the Ideation Home page, this is where you can:

• edit your ideas,
• edit other people's ideas,
• view any associated comments, and
• add comments.

Ideation and Moderation

Ideation is user-created content and, as such, is subject to the site's or the 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.

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.