Insights and Advice

Insights are like unsolicited advice.

If you and your colleagues aren’t receptive to it, you’re going to reject it.

This is the obvious problem with adding an ‘ideation’ feature for members to suggest ideas. If there isn’t someone on the other end eager to receive, respond, and nurture those ideas, the entire effort is wasted.

The real challenge isn’t to gather or identify insights from members, it’s to increase receptivity to insights from the community.

It’s very hard to do this working forwards (i.e. it’s very hard to begin with a bunch of insights from the community and try to make people care about them). It’s always best to work backwards. Begin with your colleagues and find out what insights they would find most valuable.

For example:

• Would they like to gather rapid feedback on product features, content, and marketing ideas before publishing it to a bigger group?

• Would they like members to suggest ideas for products and features? What should an idea look like? How can the idea be nurtured to be as useful as possible?

• Would you want to know what problems people are struggling with – and which are rising in popularity?

• Do you want to run polls or surveys in the community to find out what they think about any particular topic?

As you can see below, there is no shortage of insights you can gather from the community.

The key is simply to work backwards from what your colleagues want and gather the insights accordingly.