Ideas portals are just that: windows into a selection of ideas. When you create a portal, you get to choose who can access it and what sort of ideas they can see. Your ideas portal can include ideas from one, or multiple, workspaces. And the same workspace can be included in multiple portals. Even then, you can manage all the ideas in one place.
In some cases, you may wish to have several ideas portals linked to one workspace. Your customers can access the portal(s) that are most relevant to them, and in Aha! Ideas, you can review the ideas all at once.
This article discusses functionality that is included in Ideas Advanced. Please contact us if you would like a live demo or would like to try using it in your account.
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Getting started
You can set up your account to manage all the ideas from all your ideas portals in a few simple steps.
First, create a new workspace. This workspace will serve as a place for your new ideas. It can be as simple as <company name> Ideas (e.g. Acme Ideas).
Next, create at least one ideas portal. You may choose to make this portal public, private, or submit-only.
Finally, set the user permissions for your Aha! Ideas users. You can also add them as watchers for the new portal workspace in Ideas → Overview. Watchers will receive an email notification for any idea-related event in your new workspace.
Manage ideas
With your workspace created, it is time to start managing ideas!
First, you need to create a review process for new ideas. This process should match your team's workflow and your own business strategy, but broadly:
Make sure each idea captures all the information you need. You may want to adjust your ideas layouts to ensure this happens.
From the Votes tab of an idea, glean greater context into its popularity with insights, including a chart showing voting trends over time.
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Pin ideas in a special section at the top of your portal so you can draw attention to specific requests and gather more feedback faster.
If an idea is visible in multiple portals, it will be pinned in all of those portals.
Prioritize ideas based on custom fields or the ideas scorecard.
Discuss the ideas with each other — and especially with your users. You can leave comments on an idea, or if you are an Ideas Advanced customer, invite interested users to a live empathy session.
Report on trends in your ideas or ideas votes.
Considerations with this approach
Taking this centralized idea workspace approach for capturing ideas across a suite of workspaces can create simplicity for the person submitting the idea. However, here are a few considerations to discuss before deciding on this approach for your team.
You may opt to use workspace names as idea categories which can then be selected as part of the idea submission process. This may be helpful when reviewing ideas that have been submitted to the workspace team to enable quick segmentation of the ideas.
Since you are capturing ideas in one workspace, you can only use one set of custom layouts. You need to put some thought into the required idea custom fields you wish to include in the idea submission form to capture key information spanning the suite of workspaces.