How to Solicit Employee Ideas Using the IdeaScale Platform

Overview: IdeaScale’s platform serves as the foundation for employee engagement around innovation, allowing you to build on it in any way that works best for you. Actively soliciting ideas, surfacing new ones, discussing the process, making it easy to find ideas, and offering ways to organize ideas in the front and back end will all help bring more creativity to the fore.

Getting Everyone Involved

Engagement is a perpetual concern for any internal campaign. Yet, for idea generation, in particular, you need to bring everyone to the floor. There are a few ways to make it happen that should be built into any campaign.

Get Organized

Before you launch a campaign, ask how you’ll organize the information you receive. Look at it with an eye toward not just what will be convenient for the team but what will be intuitive for your audience. Here are a few guidelines:

• Look at the organizational tools in IdeaScale. In particular, the platform is built to make sorting ideas around specific campaigns quick and easy and put those campaigns front and center on the site.
• Use IdeaScale’s metrics tools to pick a small number of KPIs that you want a campaign to achieve. This helps direct thinking and point campaigns in new directions. IdeaScale offers a look into individual and campaign behavior, giving you plenty of options.
• Be specific in your campaign names and titles. If you’re looking for ways to green the company, for example, make it specific to your company. Even if you just call it “Company Sustainability” or “Company Green Initiatives,” that will tell your team what you want in a handful of words.
• Remove any jargon, internal or external. If you’re looking for ideas for reducing your carbon footprint, sort them by that language instead of more technical approaches such as “Scope 3 Emissions.”
• Put time-limited or more urgent ideas first on the platform and in your overall marketing campaign. This will help communicate urgency and draw the eye.
• Have copy that’s brief and clear when they click on an idea that explains everything in more detail. Each campaign page in IdeaScale should be a resource center for that campaign where people can learn the hows and why and how to participate.
• As the campaign unfolds, use moderation tools to link posts and answer questions. This helps with engagement and, after the campaign ends, with getting everything into one place.

Ask For Ideas

Yes, it sounds simple, yet you’d be surprised how important it is not just to ask for ideas but to keep asking for them on a consistent schedule. IdeaScale makes it easy to construct innovation campaigns and create the backbone of an internal marketing approach. You can lay out goals, time frames, and approaches and then begin rolling out materials linking back to the platform to drive engagement.

IdeaScale also places campaigns front and center on the platform in a rotating carousel. Use it to surface approaches that are further along in the process, and feature campaigns in the order you prefer. You can also incorporate them into planned email and outreach campaigns, featuring them as examples of the process that went well.

And don’t forget to make it part of your other materials and outreach. A consistent message across channels not only increases your stock of creativity but also gives it a personal touch.

Surface New Ideas And Success Stories

Another important driver of contributions is to keep surfacing ideas as they move through the process. This can be done in a few different ways, on the IdeaScale platform and off of it.

On the platform itself, there are a few different approaches you can take:

• Create a feed of posts so that new ones appear every time someone loads the platform. This is particularly effective with large organizations that get a lot of ideas, or as you see rising engagement with a campaign.
• Place ideas that are particularly popular or moving through your innovation process as part of the carousel at the top. Success tends to breed success, and engagement is no exception.
• Encourage the use of the search tool, especially on highly active and engaged campaigns. This helps people find what’s been said and build on it.
• In the back end, offer kudos for ideas and comment on ideas as a moderator. Everyone should know that you’re listening and engaged.

Promote Interactive Features

Another useful tool for the IdeaScale platform is the ability to vote, comment, and share with others. This is key to emphasize in your messaging not least because not everybody is going to feel like they have the creativity to participate. Interactive features help them contribute to the overall campaign and ensure that their voices are heard.

Another method that you should encourage is mentioned, which is part of IdeaScale as well. Being able to mention somebody with a simple @ and their name will send them an alert and pull them into the conversation. This can be done by either the team or by moderators, and it can be powerful to see somebody known throughout the organization take the time to offer their thoughts.

Discuss The Process

Everywhere someone looks in your campaign, on the platform or off, they should be seeing the process discussed in detail. Discussing how ideas go through is useful first of all for pride; people like seeing their thoughts being treated seriously and are more likely to talk to fellow employees about it.

Just as key, however, is that it helps both those fully engaged and those who are thinking about it to see that their time is well spent and the ideas are considered. Furthermore, if an idea is finished without being implemented, sending out feedback and perspective helps people to weigh and revise their ideas.

IdeaScale offers ways to post campaign updates, case studies, videos, and other content to campaign pages and on the main platform site to ensure everyone sees them. Coordinating this content with your campaign helps keep you on track and the team paying attention as their favorite idea unfolds.

There’s much more to see about how IdeaScale can help you draw in your team and draw out their best ideas. Schedule a free consultation today.