Hey!

I have been thinking about your question a couple of days now… It surely is a challenge I am familiar with, especially once you have accumulated a larger amount of ideas.

There are a number of things you could do however:

Highlighting ideation on the homepage

This might have the biggest impact on users behaviour, as many of them will browse your homepage. Here you should attempt to promote your ideation program and present users a clear benefit of getting involved. On the homepage you could:

• Present your ideation process as a featured topic: Show how you are working with ideas, emphasizing that each vote counts. Ask them to search for that one feature they always wanted to have, or invite them to submit it as a new idea.
• Create a call-to-action widget in your side bar: We have one ourselves, as you probably have noticed. A benefit is that you can track the performance in Google Analytics. Alternatively, you can also create a quicklink with the same url / text.

Include ideation in your user communication

When customers register on your community, ideally you want them to onboard as good as possible. Send them to a dedicated article, introducing the community and highlighting your ideation program. This could be part of your “welcome” email, sent after the registration has been completed, or automatically send them a private message when they have reached their first rank. Again, explain what’s in it for them when they vote.

I don’t see this too often in B2C communities, however if you are sending a newsletter to your userbase, maybe you want to have a segment which highlights new ideas that have been submitted since the last newsletter.

Highlighting ideas on category / topic level

Again sidebar widgets are being used for this, you could be creative by e.g. highlighting one or several ideas there. I personally do not like the feel of highlighting individual ideas yourself, as this could result in a bias in votes through more exposure on single ideas. So I would find it super cool to have a widget which automatically selects and displays a set of ideas (e.g. all with status “new” or “open”), maybe even in an automatic slideshow.

Mention ideation in your communication outside of the community.

E.g. if a customer support agent or an account manager hears from a customer that they have a feature request, then let them give the customer a link to your ideation categories, or even give them a link to a specific idea. This way people join your community to get engaged with ideas as a primary goal, which is probably different to other users on your community.

Ideation as a reward

I am not a big fan of this, but for completion: You could only allow active members to participate in the ideation program. Once a user reaches a certain rank (e.g. after 5 comments), automatically give them access to your ideation categories and send them a private message about this. Users will feel special, browse this category more often and will also vote more often (hopefully). Obviously I do not like not exposing your ideas to all registered users, however there might be other strategic reasons not to expose it (e.g. competitors).

I also don’t believe too much in rewarding users for participation in ideation (e.g. 5% discount for voting on your top 10 ideas), the reason is people will just perform the action needed to get the benefit. Your data will be biased by this and user activity will drop again just as fast.

In general, I think you will get the most out of your time by investing optimizing your content on ideation: Create an ideation review like we did, promote it on the homepage, build a sidebar widget and include it in your onboarding content. Brief your colleagues that they can direct customers to the community when they have feature requests.

I hope this helps a bit. We have someting coming up around ideation on inSpired soon which hopefully will connect you to others interested in this subject. So stay tuned! :)