With smartcrowds, new Idea Challenges can quickly be added and published to crowdsource ideas for to meet a very specific organisational need.
Idea Challenges are normally time-limited (in other words there is a deadline for Ideas to be contributed) because the organisation has a very specific challenge that it needs new Ideas to solve - and it normally needs those Ideas yesterday!
For example, Challenges might be published to "Reduce costs by 10%" or to find "Ideas to meet 2025 NetZero targets".
The steps below will help you create your new Ideas Challenge with just a few short actions.
1. Choose your Crowd
Your Ideas Challenge 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: 'Challenge, 'Campaign', 'Call for Ideas' etc.
Item Label: 'Idea', 'Proposed Solution', 'Suggestion' etc.
The Collection Type and Item Label that you have set for your Crowd will be inherited for all Challenges in that Crowd.
2. Add your Group
All you need to do now is create your new Challenge.
Since this Challenge will have be time-bound by a pre-defined end-date, there a few key Challenge 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 Challenge to a Crowd).
Title & Description: Give your Challenge an easily recognisable title and a description that helps people understand what type of Ideas you're looking for in the Challenge,
Image: Give your Challenge an image that matches the title and description as closely as possible to help people find and understand the purpose of the Challenge 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 Challenge without other people seeing it. When you're ready to let other people know about it, you'll need to 'Publish' the Challenge.
End Date: Since this Challenge will have a deadline, you'll need to give it an end date
We recommend short, rather than long, Challenges to get momentum going and keep interest high.
Set Deadline based on End Date: Opposite to an always-on Ideas Group (where it is advantageous to provide expert feedback quickly following the receipt of Ideas ), an Ideas Challenge normally works better by evaluating all Ideas together after the Challenge deadline has passed. This means that the deadline for providing expert feedback will be based on the number of days after the Challenge end date, rather than a number of days after the submission of each Idea.
To use this feature, toggle 'Set Deadline based on End Date to 'On'. Now, When a contributor submits a new Idea, they'll get a message that their Idea will receive feedback by a number of days following the Challenge end date (see below).
Deadline (days) Following End Date: This sets out target number of days following the Challenge end date by which Assessment of all Ideas will be due.
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.
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: For an Ideas Challenge, hundreds of Ideas can often be received to help solve the Challenge, but only a small number will normally be shortlisted for potential exploration.
Since it would be inefficient to compose a specific Assessment for all Ideas that aren't being progressed (at least for the moment), smartcrowds enables automated Assessment Request Notifications to be turned off, and changed to require an explicit manual request for Assessment of only a small number of Ideas.
To enable Manual Assessment Requests, toggle 'Send Assessment Notifications Manually' to 'On'.
