Site Launch Checklist

What is the process for launching a site?

Whether you're getting ready for pilot, soft, or full launch, the activities are generally similar:

• Seed content — Enter sample content into system to set the tone and provide examples.
• Identify users — Where possible, select the audience for IdeaPlace rollout based on their alignment with your needs, cultural assessment and readiness, and their needs.
• Create user accounts— Usually this task is handled by the IdeaPlace Application Administrator (not IdeaPlace). 
• Invite users — Invite users via email or automatically within IdeaPlace. Time this invitation to coincide with your communications plan. 
• Conduct launch (pilot, soft, and full) — Give yourself enough time and invite enough users to see a real effect during the launch activity.
• Analyze results — Determine ahead of time what results you're expecting, in terms of participation and in terms of ideation. 
• Make adjustments — To take you to the next phase or to improve the results from a fully-launched community.

Be sure to select the audience carefully. If it's too small, you won't see a network effect or be able to measure effectiveness. If it's too large, you might as well just go straight to production.

Know how you're getting users into the systems. A pilot may be just be a few dozen users. A soft-launch may be a few hundred users, but a full launch may be thousands of users. At some point, entering these users manually does not scale. Work with IT to access your directory of company users.

To prepare for a launch, you will want to ensure that all content within the site is parallel to its intending goals and framework prior to the soft launch. Seeding a few ideas in each category will show the end users an example of what you are expecting when they post content to the site.