Communications Best Practices

Challenge Communications - Global Challenge Best Practices

The IdeaPlace platform can be used to send custom emails and automatic notifications:

Custom Emails – Email All Users Tool

• Can send emails to all members of the challenge or community.
• Can only be sent by the IdeaPlace Administrator Role from each challenge.
• Not ideal for use in high profile challenge communications.

Automatic Notifications

• Sent from the platform as a result of a direct activity during a challenge, for example Idea
  Submission Acknowledgement, Idea Comments, Idea Graduation, Task Assigned etc.
• Managed and configured at a challenge level – will need to be reviewed in detail and
  updated by challenge and language.

Challenge Communications - Best Practices for Managing Challenge Communications

• Awareness and Launch communications should come from the key Sponsor or Sponsor’s office – in this case ideally the CEO or CEO’s office. This is so that people will open the emails.
• Update and Encouragement communications should come from the challenge team.
• All Leadership Team members should have scheduled time in their calendars to go onto the platform, comment and share ideas. Challenge Team can support and help those who need it and provide directions on the required behaviors to demonstrate.
• Consider the language of participants and whether any localization/translation of messages is required.
• Post challenge, it is good to share and update the development story of the ideas over a set period (about 12 months).
• Determine whether an external story can be released to the press.

IdeaPlace Platform Email Users Tool – Why we don’t recommend it for a Global Challenge 

• Emails coming from the IdeaPlace platform cannot be spoofed, therefore they will come from @spigit.com
• Audience is less likely to read these emails and they may land in the spam folder.
• A distribution list for each challenge must be carefully managed – the tool will either email everyone or a limited subset and this will be updated each time the tool is used (i.e., the distribution list is not retained on the challenge and platform)
• As we are not limiting access to the challenges (i.e., we are letting end users choose which challenge they wish to participate in) if the email ‘to list’ is left blank, ALL end users will be emailed.
• All administrators across the platform will receive an email whenever one is sent from each challenge, regardless of access.

Automatic Email Notifications

• There is a finite set of email notification templates for each challenge – we cannot create more.
• We will review and refine these once the challenge content has been finalized.
• The selected templates will be included in the translation for each of the challenges and will be managed as part of the translation stream. If an end user participates in more than one challenge, i.e., ideates, comments, @mentioned; they will receive updates from each of those challenges in the respective challenge (they are treated as separate challenges). 

Communication pitfalls to avoid

• No Program Communication Updates – Communication Planning focuses purely on the Innovation Challenge Process and lacks a Programmatic Component to celebrate key milestones.
• Weak Communications – Designing an unengaging and basic Communication Plan that relies heavily on email as the main channel of communication tones and report progress of the Innovation Challenge outcomes (the ideas selected). 

Personalize User Preferences

• Some of your user base will receive a higher number of emails as a result of their role in supporting the challenge – namely Administrators, Experts and Moderators.
• They can adjust the frequency of their notifications by selecting an option in their profile.