IdeaScale

Working as a Federal Employee for decades, I have had the opportunity to participate in a host of application development. Consequently, you would think that I wouldn't be impressed by IdeaScale's offerings, but I was in for a very pleasant experience. I was tasked by my Agency's Leadership to develop a Leading Practices Community for the purpose of sharing efficient and effective ideas organizational wide. I thought, I have no experience with this new software, how can I pull this off? Well all that stress could have been avoided had I talked to my IdeaScale SME, Mr. Matt Paulson, prior to my assignment. To make a long story short, Matt showed incredible product knowledge and was essential in having a fully, functional community available in a matter of weeks. Additionally, Matt was readily accessible and eager to provide his expert knowledge in the event of requested changes. As a result we have a great tool, which I see as providing an outstanding ROI. The Leading Practices Community will serve 30,000 employees and has the capacity to serve far more. How better could we share effectiveness and efficiency than through this tool? In my opinion IdeaScale offers unequaled product value and impressive customer support. If there are any cons to this program, they haven't surfaced so I have nothing to report.

After a thorough review of all crowdsourcing challenge platforms (and contemplating building our own) we selected IdeaScale to run the Fix California Challenge (http://www.innovateyourstate.org/final_fix_california_challenge_winners_announced) which resulted in over 450 ideas submitted through the online platform and privately as well as thousands of votes and comments. We set a low bar to entry since the design of the project was to encourage public participation and were overwhelmed by the quality, quantity and nature of the discourse of the community. IdeaScale staff were instrumental in the success of the Challenge - working with us closely prior to the launch, during the Challenge to advance stages and address any issues we had, and even after close of the Challenge listening to our experience in order to continue to improve their product. We heartily recommend them to work with!

If executed thoughtfully, crowdsourcing can be a great way for leaders of a bureacratic organization (or any organization) to hear (interactively) from the people doing the actual work, whether they are seeking new ideas or specific information. Ideascale is a great first step to building a strong crowdsourcing program. It's incredibly user-friendly, the site is easy to design, and it's a one-step process for new members to join. The best feature, however, is the customer service. Everyone is incredibly friendly, responsive and helpful (and IT help is literally 24/7!). Our IdeaScale reps went above and well beyond to help us get our program off the ground - they became true partners. IdeaScale is also constantly evolving to provide an even better user experience. You can't go wrong!

We were on this platform in minutes and we started populating our ideas instantly. Addition of members in free version is child's play. We have voting, comments, sharing of links, editing the Landing page, logo addition, moderation, reports, automatic mail alerts etc. (Attachment of files is not possible in Free Version, but this is still OK for us at this stage of evaluation)

We are able to test fully all the features like Leaderboard, We can run multiple campaigns, we have still to start using the other features, but we hope to mature soon and start using these and many other features.

This platform is already a big hit within our core team of Innovation.

So far amongst all the platforms that we have seen adopting this seemed to be a cake walk!

As an organization that has team members that don't sit in front of a computer all day, IdeaScale has been great. Team members can access the site from their home computer or mobile device and send us ideas any time of the day. It is easy for us to interact with members on the site and let them know the status of their suggestions. Reporting on this site could be more robust, but the data is available in raw form. All the folks that work for IdeaScale are great; they are always available to help and are open to suggestions. I highly recommend IdeaScale as an innovation management and team member engagement platform.