Getting ideas flowing with an ideation blog

Tap into the creativity of your members and encourage them to brainstorm, develop, and refine ideas using an ideation blog.

An ideation blog is a type of blog that is designed to generate ideas on a particular topic, collect feedback, and reach a consensus on the best ideas. An ideation blog can only exist within a community and membership is limited to the community, but you can manage its settings from your My Blogs page. A community can contain multiple ideation blogs.

Creating an ideation blog

  1. From the navigation bar, click Communities and select the community you'd like to make an ideation blog for.
  2. Add the Ideation Blog app to your community. For more information, see Adding apps and widgets to the Highlights page. If an Ideation Blog is already added, skip to the next step.
  3. In the community menu, click Ideation Blog then Start An Ideation Blog.
  4. Enter the details for your ideation blog and select the access level that you want to grant to members:
    • Author: Allows members to post ideas to the ideation blog.
    • Draft: Allows members to submit ideas for review and save drafts.
    • Viewer: Allows members to view ideas but not to contribute to the ideation blog.
  5. Click Save.

Updating the ideation blog views

  1. From the navigation bar, click Communities then select the community containing the ideation blog you'd like to manage.
  2. Click Community Actions and select Edit Community from the list.
  3. Click the Ideation Blog tab.
  4. Select what Ideation Blog content you'd like to see on the community Highlights page and the app itself.
    Note: Want to show the Ideation Blog on the community Highlights page? See Adding apps and widgets to the Highlights page.
  5. Click Save or Save And Close.

Managing the ideation blog

  1. From the navigation bar, click Communities then select the community containing the ideation blog you'd like to manage.
  2. In the community menu, click Ideation Blog then select the ideation blog that you want to manage.
  3. To manage general settings for the ideation blog, click Ideation Blog Actions and update the settings as needed:
    Options for managing an ideation blog
    • Manage Ideation Blog: In addition to managing the settings that are common for all blogs, for example roles, you can also control voting:
      • Choose Unlimited voting to allow members to vote as many times as they like.
      • Choose Set a voting limit to restrict the number of votes each member can cast to the number you specify.
    • Export Ideas: The following fields from each idea are saved to a CSV file: Title, Creator, Create time, Last updater, Last updated time, Content, Tags, Vote Count, Comment Count, Status (graduated or not), and Activity link.

Managing an idea

  1. From the navigation bar, click Communities then select the community containing the ideation blog you'd like to manage.
  2. In the community menu, click Ideation Blog then the Ideas tab, and select the idea that you want to manage.
  3. When you decide that an idea has enough support from the community, select the idea and click Graduate. Graduating an idea means creating a community activity for that idea.
    • If you don't want to develop the idea any further, simply clear the checkbox for Create an activity for this idea to develop it further.
    • If you change your mind about a graduated idea, open the idea and select Cancel Graduation.