This tip sheet is an assemblage of first hand suggestions from clients that have been successful adopters of the IdeaScale product. Commonalities between them and anecdotal examples provide guidelines for overall moderation success.

1.
COMMUNITY MODERATION TIP SHEET
HOW TO IMPROVE COMMUNITY WORKFLOW
IDEASCALE

2. Define Goals
Organizations that define their goals early on
and then communicate those goals help
moderators know what to look for. It helps
assessment happen throughout the entire
idea lifecycle (even during the submission
process).
Reward Moderators
Moderators do most of the heavy lifting in
your community: monitoring for appropriate
content, maintaining responsiveness,
evaluating ideas for feasibility and
applicability, stewarding them through the
lifecycle. Rewarding good moderation will
create better moderators and therefore a
better ideation process.
Recruit Subject Matter
Experts
A curated conversation depends on
quality dialogue. The more those in your
community know about the ideas being
addressed, the more thoughtful their
responses will be. Identify thought leaders
with an organization to help drive the
conversation and assess ideas.
Enable Workflow
Setting required vote and comment
thresholds helps flag promising ideas early
on. Define community thresholds and
route ideas to reviewers even earlier.
Be Responsive
You can’t (and probably shouldn’t) deliver on
all ideas, but organizations should respond to
every idea. And, perhaps more importantly,
when ideas are moved forward, selected, and
implemented, these changes should be
communicated to the author of the idea and
the community.
Bring it Offline
When possible, engaging moderators in
an offline context, will help articulate and
move those lightning rod ideas that are
most exciting into the next phase of
development. It also makes the
moderators feel more integrated into the
ideation process.
Check In Regularly
As a best practice, one of IdeaScale’s
clients requires all moderators to enter
the community to comment, update idea
statuses, and respond to questions at least
every two weeks. And even when there’s
been no movement on an idea, it is
important to update the author and its
followers of where it’s at and what they
can expect. Every idea. At least every two
weeks until it’s complete.
2COMMUNITY MODERATION TIP SHEET
Make your community vibrant, navigable, and lightweight.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
sales@ideascale.com
Global / Americas
+1 800-­‐549-­‐9198
New Zealand
+64-­‐080-­‐099-­‐5088
Australia
+61-­‐02-­‐9037-­‐8414
United Kingdom
+44-­‐0-­‐808-­‐189-­‐1476