Idea campaigns are a great way to mobilise the organisation and fill up your idea pipeline with high quality ideas that can be turned into projects.
The call for ideas is at the core of every idea campaign and crucial for its success. A well framed call for ideas ensures that you attract the right audience and receive relevant and high quality ideas.
As an innovation manager it is your job to frame the campaign in a way that it engages your target group and achieves its set KPI’s. The art of writing a call for ideas that creates good results might seem a daunting task. However, with our guidance you can master it and ensure you get the most out of your campaign.
Step 1: Get stakeholders on board
When planning an idea campaign we strongly recommend to work closely with all relevant stakeholders of the campaign. Who should sponsor the campaign, who should evaluate the ideas, who will manage the campaign?
To increase the chances of success, it is particularly important to anchor your campaign in executive management. Make sure that someone with executive power sponsors your campaign. This will help you to create momentum and make sure that the best ideas coming out of the campaign get backing and resources.
How to get executive management on board?
We all know that executives have limited time and resources. Thus, it is crucial to show that their involvement as a sponsor will only demand a minimum of involvement and time. In return they will receive high potential ideas. Record a 1-2min long video in which your sponsor emphasises the importance of the campaign for the company. This is a great tool to mobilise your audience and increase the amount of submissions.
Step 2: Define the topic
Ask yourself why you are running an idea campaign, what is the problem you want to address/solve. Gather information about the situation and circumstance causing the problem. Establish a context for the campaign by describing the situation and providing background information. Make sure to involve people who have deep knowledge in the problem as they can help you define the topic. Think about who should be the target audience. The topic should be framed with the target audience in mind.
Step 3: Define your desired outcomes
Describe what the desired outcomes of the campaign are, what kind of ideas you are looking for and what requirements the solutions must meet? This will help the participants to submit ideas that are relevant and within the scope of the campaign. Set the criteria that the ideas will be evaluated against. Transparency of the evaluation process is crucial as it allows you to justify your decisions and avoid demotivating idea authors which ideas didn’t advance.
Step 4: Create the call for ideas
Now that you have defined the topic and your desired outcomes, it is time to put it to action and create the actual call for ideas. Based on 10+ years of experience running idea campaigns we have come up with a template that helps you to write a strong and compelling call for ideas. Feel free to use the template below.
Call for ideas best practice template:
Fill out the template below and add it in the description field of the campaign in the platform.
Problem/ Situation
We are running this idea campaign because...
Call for ideas
Insert video of Sponsor (recommended)
We are looking for ideas that...
• ...
• ...
• ...
Ideas should NOT...
• ...
• ...
• ...
Screening Parameters
We are screening ideas based on:
• ...
• ...
• ...
• ...
Campaign Sponsor
Sponsor Name
Sponsor Title
Contact
Name of Contact
Contact email