Four tips for making a successful idea marketplace

In order to celebrate the creation of our 400th idea marketplace, here are some tips that I frequently share with idea marketplace creators.  If you have other advice, please add it below.

• Make sure you have enough ideas

One of the most common problems I see is that people start their idea marketplaces with too few ideas.  This makes the voting process boring for your visitors. Try to come up with at least 50 ideas to start with. If you are having trouble getting to 50 (I know it seems like a lot), take some of the ideas that you already have and split them up. For example, “improve the cafeteria” could become “keep the cafeteria open later on Friday and Saturday,” “more vegan dining options,” and “bring back Fajita Fridays.” By taking big ideas and splitting them into lots of little ideas you create a much more interesting experience for your voter, and you get more actionable results. If “improve the cafeteria” scores well, it is not exactly clear what to do, but if “bring back Fajita Fridays” scores well you know what to serve next Friday.

• Generate traffic

Your idea marketplaces won’t work well if you don’t get people to participate.  I’ve seen a variety of approaches to generate traffic, and our most successful idea marketplaces so far have distributed the url through a group email list. Other approaches that people have tried are embedding an idea marketplace in a website/blog or sending out the url via Facebook or Twitter. Here are some example tweets that people have used:

• http://twitter.com/craigslist_fndn/status/19292090945
• http://twitter.com/tbrd/status/19349633057
• http://twitter.com/SupportScott/status/20151866326

Here are some approaches that have not been tried yet (as far as I know), but might be interesting: online ads, distributing postcards or signs with the url, newspapers or magazine articles.

• Customize

We provide the tools to let you customize your idea marketplace by adding a logo, creating a welcome message, and changing the language.  We recommend that you use these features (and not just because we worked hard on them); we think they lead to a better experience for your voters.

Adding a logo is a quick and easy way to make your voters feel comfortable with allourideas.org.  Adding a welcome message also makes them feel comfortable and explains the how idea marketplace works.  I think some good things to include in a welcome message are: 1) telling visitors that you want their feedback and how you plan to use it; 2) reminding visitors that they can participate by voting or adding their own ideas; and 3) making a clear ask (e.g. “please take a few minutes to participate” or “please vote at least 10 times and add one idea”).  Here’s an example welcome message:

We want your ideas. Please participate — vote as much as you want and add your own ideas. You can also see what others think by clicking “view results.” Please take a few minutes to give your input. Thanks!

Finally, we have translated the voter-facing portions of the idea marketplace into French, Spanish, and Portuguese. (If you’d like to translate the site into another language please let me know; it probably takes about 1 hour for a native speaker).

All of these options—adding a logo, adding a welcome message, and changing the language—can be done at your admin control panel: http://www.allourideas.org/[your_idea_marketplace]/admin.  Also, watch this blog for announcements of new customization options.

• Pilot test and iterate

On several occasions, pilot testing has proven to be very valuable for refining the question text, seed ideas, and welcome message.  Therefore, before launching a large idea marketplace, I recommend creating a test version and having a small number of people participate.  Based on feedback that you get from them, create a new idea marketplace that you will use for the real data collection.

Maybe you have some other tips or experiences you want to share?  Please add them using the comment feature below.