Ideation

Ideation is the process of generating or coming up with ideas, solutions, tactics, and measures you can take in order to grow your community. Ideation can be about anything or any stage. It can help create an opportunity to critically analyze your community and take actions to activate engagement, study insights, and take calculated steps in the right direction.

Ideation is an extremely important aspect of community-building so you need to be able to set some time apart for this. Ideation is not about doing something new every day, rather it’s about doing something right when it best suits your goals. Ideas shouldn’t be confused with experiments. Ideas refine into experiments, and experiments refine into strategies. Keep in mind, that not every idea you have will knock the ball out of the park. Take time to reflect, comprehend, and then execute.

Here are some things you can do at the ideation stage -

• The first part is the most abstract phase - this is where you jot down every idea you have, good or bad.
• Make a pros and cons list for each of them - what might work, what might not work, what will have what consequences, what seems most accurate at that given time, etc.
• Discuss it with your team (or anyone else whose judgment you can trust) and get different perspectives.
• Filter out the ideas that seem irrelevant or less impactful for the moment, but don’t discard them, they might be appropriate someplace else.
• Prioritize one or a few ideas at once, and run them through some iterations for fine-tuning.

It’s important during the ideation stage to dig deep into what your community accomplishes. The deeper you go, the more effectively will you be able to define your goals. You must ask yourself questions like what pain points are you solving, where should this community be in 6 months, will this community make any difference, etc.

Here’s a framework for you to define what will be your contributions towards the community -

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