We have a new tool for you: Brainstormer!
The idea of an EHQ brainstorming tool has been floating around our offices for a while, but good things take time and now we are excited to be able to present what we consider our best looking tool yet.
What is Brainstormer?
Brainstormer is an "ideation" tool. It joins Discussion Forums, Surveys & Forms, Q&A, Stories, Mapping, Guest Book and Quick Polls.
Imagine a room filled with people, plastering your walls with post-its full of great ideas and sticking little hearts on other people's ideas that they love. Now take this into an online space and you will might imagine Brainstormer.
Brainstormer is deliberately simple in its design and you can to use it to get your community involved in your consultation quickly and easily. Your participants can post as many ideas as they like or contribute by hearting other people's ideas. These 'micro-contributions' can be very powerful as they engage your visitors with one click.
What exactly is 'Ideation'?
It is the creative process of generating ideas, in any shape or form. There are different techniques that can be used in the ideation process and brainstorming is arguably the most well-known process.
How do I use Brainstormer?
You can set up Brainstormer similar to how you set up any of the other EHQ tools, for example our Forums. See here for step by step instructions.
What do I use it for?
For anything you want to generate ideas for, internally or externally. One specific example one can think of is the re-design of a park. Get your community involved and pick their brains about how to enhance the park. You might want to keep your Brainstormer very open, by not restricting the type of ideas you are after ("Share your ideas how to improve our park"), or by focusing your community's ideas on a specific aspect of the park ("Share your ideas about what to do with the public BBQ area").
How does it look like?
Like this. But don't look here, go into your EHQ now and start exploring it in your own projects.
