smartcrowds makes it easy to create one or more places for people to add their ideas at any time.
We call these 'always-on' Ideas Groups because, well, they are always on, ready for ideas to be received and grouped together in a way that suits your organisation!
Examples might be "Operations Ideas", "Marketing Ideas" or "Health and Safety Ideas". And you'll probably also want a general place (for example "Ad-hoc Ideas") for any ideas that don't fit neatly into any of the collections that you've created.
The steps below will help you create your new Ideas Group with just a few short actions.
1. Choose your Crowd
Your Ideas Group will need to be in an appropriate Crowd, so find the Crowd that you want to use (Browse-> Crowds-> My Crowds), or create a new Crowd if there isn't one that that meets your needs (you'll need the Crowd Creator privilege for this)
Full details on managing Crowds are covered in this article.
Don't forget to set the Collection Type and Item Label for your Crowd to something appropriate - for example:
Collection Type: 'Ideas Group', 'Suggestion Box', 'Department' etc.
Item Label: 'Idea', 'Suggestion', 'Proposal' etc.
The Collection Type and Item Label that you have set for your Crowd will be inherited for all Groups in that Crowd.
2. Add your Group
All you need to do now is create your new Group.
Since this Group will be 'always-on', there a few key Group settings and options listed below that you should know about to get best use out of it.
(You can also check out this article for full details on how to add a new Group to a Crowd).
Title & Description: Give your Group an easily recognisable title and a description that helps people understand what type of Ideas you're looking for in the Group,
Image: Give your Group an image that matches the title and description as closely as possible to help people find and understand the purpose of the Group quickly.
Managers: You'll need to decide who is going to manage Ideas that are contributed - this means choosing Moderators (people who will allow or not allow submissions to be published), Assessors (experts who will provide feedback) and Authorisers (people who may need to publish idea Outcomes). Even if you are not using all of these roles for now, you'll need to choose at least one person for each of the roles - and you can add more than 1 person for each role if you want.
Status: This will be set to 'Draft' initially, so that you can create the Group without other people seeing it. When you're ready to let other people know about it, you'll need to 'Publish' the Group.
End Date: Since this Group will be 'always-on' (i.e. it doesn't have a deadline for Idea contributions), leave this field blank.
If you do add an end date, the Group will close when the end date is reached, which is more appropriate to time-limited Idea Challenges.
Deadline Days Following Submission: This sets out the deadline for an Assessment of Ideas to be composed. The deadline for Assessment is calculated using the number of days after an Idea has been contributed.
As soon as the deadline is passed, the pool of Assessor(s) for this Group will be notified by email that an Assessment is now overdue. Note that this field cannot be changed on this screen, as it is a Crowd setting that applies to all Groups in this Crowd. If you need this value to be changed, you'll need to ask the Crowd Owner.
Submission Requires a Decision: smartcrowds has an 'out-of-the-box' workflow for progressing Ideas.
When the option is set to on (default), the workflow is enabled for all Ideas that are added to the Group, and begins by requiring an initial 'decision' to be made for each Idea.
The workflow can be turned off by setting the 'Submission Requires a Decision' setting to 'Off'. When the option is turned off, the requirement to record a decision is removed.
(Note, a custom workflow is also available if required).
Send Assessment Notifications Manually: By default smartcrowds will send an Assessment request notification to the pool of Assessors for the Group as soon as an Idea is received. This default setting is recommended for 'always-on' Groups to help ensure that all idea contributors receive feedback from an expert within a preset timeframe.
This automatic request notification can be removed (not recommended) by setting the 'Send Assessment Notifications Manually' option to 'On'. When set, Assessment requests will only be sent through manual action.
