Moderation Tips

Community Moderators carry most of the day-to-day responsibility for keeping an ideation community productive — monitoring content, evaluating ideas, and guiding them through the lifecycle. The following practices, drawn from experience across IdeaScale communities, help organizations support moderators and strengthen the overall ideation process.

Define Goals
Organizations that define goals early, and communicate those goals clearly, help moderators know what to look for when assessing ideas. Clear goals allow assessment to happen throughout the entire lifecycle of an idea, including during the submission process.

Reward Moderators
Community Moderators do most of the heavy lifting in a community: monitoring for appropriate content, maintaining responsiveness, evaluating ideas for feasibility and applicability, and stewarding ideas through the lifecycle. Rewarding good moderation encourages better moderators and, in turn, 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 help 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 on where it’s at and what they can expect.