Customer feedback arrives through many channels: A customer submits an idea in your portal, a salesperson records a request during a call, or a support specialist receives a feature request in a ticket. Proxy votes help you bring all of this feedback into Aha! Ideas.
A proxy vote is a vote that one person adds on behalf of someone else. This helps you collect product feedback in one place — even when it arrives through sales or support instead of directly through your ideas portal. Each proxy vote links to an organization and can also link to a contact at that organization.
This article is for Aha! Ideas administrators who configure and manage proxy voting across portals, and for workspace owners and product managers who review and act on proxy votes.
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Overview
Proxy voting is a portalwide setting. When you enable it for a private ideas portal, every user on that portal can add proxy votes for ideas in that portal.
Many teams use both internal and external ideas portals. A common pattern looks like this:
An internal portal for team members such as sales, support, and customer success. Proxy voting is enabled in this portal. Users log feedback on behalf of customers. This portal must be private.
An external portal for customers or partners who submit ideas and vote directly. Proxy voting is not enabled in this portal. Users submit feedback only on their own behalf. This portal can be public or private.
Proxy voting works best in internal portals that only your team can access. In this setup, internal teams add proxy votes and link them to organizations and contacts. Your external portal focuses on direct customer input and does not need proxy voting turned on.
If you want to manage ideas, votes, and proxy votes from both internal and external portals in the same workspace, select the same workspaces in the settings for each portal.
When you enable proxy voting in a private portal:
All users on that portal can add proxy votes on behalf of others.
Workspace owners, contributors, and reviewers can add proxy votes to ideas in that portal from within Aha! Ideas.
When users submit an idea through the portal, they can add a proxy vote with the idea.
Portal users see a Proxy votes section and tab on every idea's details page. If you limit visibility to a user's own proxy votes, the section is labeled My proxy votes.
The Vote button beside each idea becomes a dropdown. Portal users can vote as themselves or add a proxy vote.
Other ideas portal settings in Overview → Voting do not apply to proxy votes. Proxy votes do not follow any limits on the number of votes per user and do not count against a total votes per idea setting.
Enable proxy voting in a portal
To enable proxy voting in an ideas portal, you need to be an administrator with customization permissions. You can enable this for any private ideas portal:
Go to Ideas → Overview.
In the Settings panel, click the pencil icon next to the portal where you want to enable proxy voting. This opens the portal's settings.
On the Overview tab in your portal settings, navigate to Voting → Proxy votes.
Select Enable proxy voting.
Choose whether portal users can view and edit Only their own proxy votes or All proxy votes.
Any user in the portal can add a proxy vote on behalf of a customer after you enable proxy voting. Turn on proxy voting only for internal portals your team uses. If you have both an internal and an external ideas portal, enable proxy voting for the internal portal and keep it disabled for the external portal.
Manage organizations and contacts
When someone adds a proxy vote in Aha! Ideas, they always add it on behalf of an organization. An organization can be a company, an account, or another group that you choose to track. Organizations can also collect regular votes, but every proxy vote must link to an organization.
You can also add contacts to organizations. Contacts are the people who work at those organizations. Adding a contact to a proxy vote makes it clear who to follow up with.
There are three ways to create organizations and contacts:
Import organizations using a CSV import.
Administrators create and manage organizations and contacts in account settings.
Ideas portal users create a new organization when they add a proxy vote to an idea. They can link the vote to an existing contact or create a new contact for that organization.
Create organizations
To create organizations and contacts ahead of time:
Go to Ideas → Organizations.
Click Add organization to create a new organization.
Organizations are shared across ideas portals in your Aha! Ideas account. You can use the same organization across multiple portals.
Add contacts to an organization
To add contacts to an organization:
Click the organization name to open its drawer view.
Click the Contacts tab.
Click Add to create contacts.
Add information such as first name, last name, email address, and any custom fields you have added to your contacts layout.
Merge organizations
You might need to tidy organizations over time, as portal users may create duplicates or misspell names. From Ideas → Organizations:
Click an organization to edit its details.
Hover over an organization and click Replace to merge it with another organization. This merges the organization and all proxy votes linked to it.
Import proxy votes and organizations
In addition to importing ideas and ideas portal users, you can import proxy votes and organizations using CSV import.
In systems you import from, Aha! Ideas organizations may be labeled as accounts or companies.
To import proxy votes or organizations:
Go to the User menu → Settings → Workspace → Import from CSV.
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On the first step of the import, choose what to import:
Select Idea votes to import proxy votes. Choose a portal and decide whether to email the vote's creator.
Each proxy vote must include an idea and an organization. Include the creator's email address if you want them to receive an email.
Select Ideas organizations to import organizations. You can import organizations (but cannot import organization contacts yet).
Any organizations you import are accessible from any ideas portal in your Aha! Ideas account.
Customize proxy vote layouts
With your organizations created, customize the form people see when they add a proxy vote. The goal of this form is to link the proxy vote to an organization and to gather the information you need to understand demand and the value of an idea. For example, you could add custom fields to track priority level, expected revenue, or level of effort.
To customize the proxy vote form layout, go to the User menu -> Settings → Account → Custom layouts.
From here, you have two proxy vote forms that you can customize:
The Proxy votes layout adjusts what users in Aha! Ideas see when they add a proxy vote internally. This form can include fields that you do not want to expose to portal users.
The Ideas portal — Proxy votes layout adjusts what portal users see when they add a proxy vote in an ideas portal.
The only required field is Organization, as every proxy vote must be tied to an organization. Beyond that, you can require a Description, add a custom field for priority, allow the submitter to include a link, or capture any other information that is useful.
With your custom layouts complete, assign them to the appropriate workspace:
Navigate to User menu -> Settings → Workspace → Configure.
Select your layout for Proxy votes and Ideas portal — Proxy votes.
You can also perform this configuration at the workspace line level so child workspaces inherit layouts from that workspace line.
You can edit, create, and select a custom layout for each portal from your portal settings. By default, the portal uses the layout assigned to each workspace within workspace settings. If you choose a different layout in the Custom layout dropdown, it applies only to that portal and not to other portals that include the same workspace.
Manage proxy votes
Proxy votes communicate customer demand for an idea, just like regular votes do. Proxy votes become an important part of the conversation as you manage submitted ideas for your portal.
Proxy votes count toward an idea's total votes. In a list report, you can sort by votes, and the Idea votes column reflects total demand for an idea.
From an idea's details view, you can see more information:
The Votes tab shows a breakdown of proxy and regular votes.
You also see other idea insights, such as Organization count, Total opportunity value, and a chart of voting trends over time.
You also see a Proxy votes section on the idea detail view.
Click the + icon to add a proxy vote. This uses a customizable form layout that can differ from the layout in the ideas portal.
Use the Proxy votes table to see information from every field in the proxy vote form. From here, you can click the vote submitter's name to email them directly or adjust information in the form.
Click View in report to open a pre-built list report on votes for the idea. You can sort and filter columns as needed.
The proxy vote table layout on an idea's detail view depends on the Proxy votes layout. If you add proxy votes through an integration, make sure you have the Link and Value fields enabled in that layout so this information appears in the proxy vote table.
You can also delete multiple proxy votes at once by bulk editing votes from a list report.
Use proxy votes with integrations
Use this section to connect proxy votes to Salesforce or Zendesk and see requests from sales and support in one place.
If you use Ideas Advanced, you can integrate Aha! Ideas with Salesforce or Zendesk. These integrations help you capture requests from your sales and support teams. When configured, the Proxy votes section on an idea's details view shows proxy votes that came through Aha! Ideas and proxy votes that came through integrations.
Customize your proxy vote layout to include data from Salesforce so you can see insights into the organizations behind your proxy votes. Map fields from Salesforce to proxy vote fields so details such as the Opportunity value, Probability, Close date, and Opportunity owner appear on proxy votes in Aha! Ideas.
Enable Show proxy vote form in the Capture ideas step of your Salesforce integration. This displays the proxy vote form in Salesforce so you can gather additional information when someone logs a request.
Report on proxy votes
Use this section to analyze proxy votes and understand demand across ideas and organizations.
Ideas management depends on the ability to analyze idea votes. With proxy voting enabled, you can build reports that separate proxy and regular voting, use pre-built list reports to examine the voting breakdown for a specific idea, and report on organizations.
You can:
View a breakdown of proxy votes for an idea or group of ideas by creating a report that includes the idea votes record and adding idea organizations or idea contacts as a related record. Any vote with an associated organization or contact is a proxy vote.
View a pre-built list report for an idea's votes by opening the idea in Aha! Ideas and clicking View as list report next to the Proxy votes table. This report is filtered by default for votes where an idea organization is not blank. You can adjust this filter as needed.
See all proxy votes for an organization by creating a report that includes ideas, idea votes, and idea organizations, then filtering for a specific organization.
You can also report on organizations themselves, from the proxy votes linked to each organization to all of their ideas and the status of those ideas. Navigate to Ideas → Organizations, then open an organization's details view to access pre-built reports or create your own custom report from the Idea organizations, Idea contacts, and Idea votes data tables.
Share any report you create on proxy votes by selecting an export option from the Share menu:
Select Share as webpage to invite people outside your Aha! Ideas account to view the report.
Select Export to Excel or Export to CSV to export a list report for further analysis. You can import from CSV later to update data.
Export the report to PNG image or PDF document if you need a static version.