Engagement Creates Value

We have a central premise for Kindling: increased engagement results in greater value for our customers which raises the probability for renewal. Renewals are the ultimate measurement for how you’re doing in SaaS, which means engagement is one of the most impactful metrics to track. Kindling is a social system that comes to life through user-generated content. The more that interesting and relevant content that flows through Kindling, the more likely users are to interact with this content, and the more positive outcomes are likely to emerge. Problems solved, opportunities realized.

The Metric

In order to determine if your company’s activities are increasing or decreasing your users’ engagement with your product over time, you first need a metric. Identify the valuable contributions a user can make in your product, and if you find activities that you’re not leaving a record of in data, add those. You should only choose the activities that create value, so exclude noise like a user editing their notification settings or clicking a navigation item. This will result in the truest measure of meaningful activity.

Next, normalize this by the number of active users per day, so that you can compare this figure across time as your user base grows. Now you have a true engagement metric. As you track this over time, the rate of change in this number will very explicitly tell you how well your company efforts and the software platform are able to engage users. This information is gold.

Drivers

We’ve observed four main drivers of engagement for Kindling:

Performance

Focusing on performance brings into view two additional metrics: server response time and browser page load time. Simply stated: humans don’t like to wait for information, and the longer you make them wait, the more likely they are to click over to espn.com or switch over to email. Every millisecond counts. We’ve seen a strong correlation between increasing engagement and decreasing user wait times.

Features

This is the most obvious driver and likely the one that your product team focuses on the most. Obviously, we attempt to focus on those features that are more likely to increase engagement. But how does that translate to your roadmap? Changes that simplify the user’s experience correlate strongly with increased engagement. Without exposing too much of our secret recipe, we’ve found two other engagement drivers: quality of notifications (in both granularity and content) and the system’s ability to identify and recommend relevant content. Our advice is to develop a thesis about a feature, ship it, and track its impact on engagement. If the needle moves up, you’ve done good. If the needle moves down, you have a problem.

Psychology

This is the area that the Kindling product team is beginning to focus on the most. I’ve taken inspiration from watching my daughter use Instagram, which is effectively an elaborate social game for her and her friends. There’s a certain amount of social pressure to participate. You can imagine what the notification that interrupts her on the phone when someone likes her photo does for engagement. Humans crave rewards and a small social payoff. Kindling is a social system with amazing content and lots of opportunity to deliver social reward, and we’ll continue to look for the best ways to leverage this psychology to drive engagement. Sally just followed my idea? I just passed Jim on the Marketing Leaderboard? My idea was just approved? Cool.

One example of psychology driving engagement in Kindling is that Campaigns drive a disproportionate amount of user activity. Why? Campaigns are both targeted and time-constrained, and people like contributing to a very specific context (answering a particular question), and real estate brokers figured out long ago that urgency is a great way to spur action.

Education

We’ve spent a tremendous amount of company energy on figuring out to help a customer not only successfully launch Kindling (the software), but on how to best structure their Innovation Program. We’ve found that these efforts lead to a much healthier Program generally, and as a result, increase user engagement. We recently launched Kindling Academy, which allows our users to learn about a Kindling feature or answer a specific question, without having to contact our support team. Informed, motivated users are more likely to engage, so focus your energies on keeping your users informed.

Measure Twice, Cut Once

It can be very difficult to draw direct causation from any particular activity and its impact on user engagement, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. We’ve found that tracking the rate of change in engagement against key milestones like a big new feature or the launch of Academy to be crucially important. So try focusing at first on the trend line. Over time, is your product, and your company’s efforts, engaging users more or less often? An upward-facing trend means that in aggregate you’re succeeding in creating value, and in turn, more likely to renew your customers. And to answer the question posed by this post, renewals are ultimately the most important metric for your enterprise SaaS app.

A final cautionary note: as with everything, try not to take this to the extreme. You can easily goose up your short-term engagement numbers by forcing users to do additional, unnecessary work. But users are smart, and you can’t fool them too long (this reminds me of media sites that force you to click through a slideshow article to get you to view ten ads versus one).

Always keep an eye towards long-term user satisfaction and engagement.

At Kindling, we’re seeing more and more how critical the role of the Moderator is to your innovation program, echoed by some of our most successful customers. The Moderator is like a coach who keeps their team focused on the task at hand and motivates them to achieve their goals.

While innovation programs are meant to foster creativity and build a culture of positive collaboration, we’ve also heard from customers of certain instances when the platform was used to post something irrelevant or inflammatory.

Sometimes content isn’t productive. In these cases, a Moderator has two options: either respond that the comment isn’t helpful, or remove the post. We’ve recently added the remove functionality to give Moderators this option.

To some, remove may seem counter-intuitive since one of the goals of the platform is to encourage all sorts of ideas from across an organization. However, situations where content needs to be quickly removed from public view can sometimes occur. The remove function ensures that Moderators have the option to remove non-constructive behavior or other misuses of the product.

The remove function enables Moderators to continue directing the innovation program forward with productive and actionable ideas. Moderators are key, and this is just one way we’ve made their jobs a little easier.

Visit Kindling Academy to learn about our enhanced reports showing removed Ideas, Comments, and Posts.

Imagine you work for a bike company and you’re out on a bike ride on a Sunday afternoon. You see a competitor’s bike that has great looking spokes and you want to share them with your team. Good design should support that process and make it easy to share.

An idea can be fully expressed through media

Kindling is a conversation platform, and while in many cases a conversation is words, it is sometimes easier or more natural to express an idea or thought in media, rather than purely in text. We’ve listened to feedback from our customers—the New York Times, LeapFrog and others—that some ideas shine best in other forms of media, and we’re evolving the product to better support this case.

With our last few releases, we’re better embracing this concept. Today that means you can upload a visual asset directly from your computer or you can take a picture on your phone and add it directly to an idea or post. In our most current release, we’re dropping the requirement that an idea has to have a text description. Before this week’s release of Kindling, you’d have to write something in the description. You no longer have to.

The conversation will then build off of the image. If you’re a user who works for Tracer Bikes and you take that picture of a competitor’s spokes, you might attach the photo as the full representation of that idea.

As we continue to embrace media, video is next. We are starting to hear from our customers that in this use case (contributing to an innovation program & discussing ideas), some people are more inclined to talk over writing. We all have cameras in our hands now, and we can fully express an thought with a quick video clip. Today you have to get that file hosted and streamed into Kindling, and we plan to make that more seamless for the user of Kindling.

Different users prefer to express their ideas in different forms, and we’ll continue to make it easier for all of these types of users to contribute to the conversation in Kindling. Let us know what you think!

New Features include:

‘Remove’ action – Administrators and Moderators can now remove Comments, Ideas, or Posts from Kindling by selecting the ‘Remove’ option from the actions menu.

Items that have been removed in this manner will no longer appear in Kindling (except in the ‘Removed Entities’ Report).  This has been our most requested feature since the launch of Kindling version 3 and we’re excited to add it to our repertoire!

‘Removed Entities’ Report – as a corollary to the new ‘Remove’ action, Administrators and Moderators can use this report to see a list of all Ideas, Posts and Comments that have been removed from Kindling.

‘Idea Comments’ Report – Administrators and Moderators can see all Comments left on Ideas.  This, coupled with the existing ‘Idea Details’ Report, provides a comprehensive view of each Idea in Kindling.

Description on Ideas & Posts no longer required – Sometimes an Idea or Post can be fully expressed in the title, therefore we’re no longer requiring that a description be included.

Support for SAML Single-Sign-On SAML users who are logged in at their IdP and try to access Kindling will automatically be redirected and logged into Kindling. This feature is optional for Kindling instances that have been integrated with SAML. To login via native authentication in this mode, the Kindling login form is still be accessible by going to {your Kindling URL}/login

Bug Fixes Include:

Share Dialog Box in IE8 – The share email was sent successfully but the share dialog box would not close

Pagination for Filtered Ideas – When a user chose an idea state to filter ideas, pagination would break. It would not bring the user to the following pages and just bring the user back to top of the first page.

For the summer of 2013 we’re looking to hire a team of interns who will spend three months in our office. From design to development, to sales and QA, we’re looking for smart individuals who want to see how a product shop works in NYC. You’ll learn about the business and work alongside experts in your field. If things go well, we will seriously consider making you a full-time offer post-graduation.

Kindling is a small firm of design–driven, passionate technologists who work in midtown Manhattan. Our main product is a social innovation platform for helping companies innovate from within.

As our accounting intern, you will help us keep track of the money we’re receiving and spending, prepare reports for our board and investors and generally help organize our financial records.

You’re our ideal intern if you:

• Are familiar with the basic of business accounting.
• Are familiar with Excel, Quickbooks, or similar tools.
• Are interested in software or technology.
• Are organized and detail-oriented.
• Like working with small teams of people.
• Have strong written skills.

If this interests you, we’d love for you to get in touch at intern@kindlingapp.com. When you apply, please use “I’m your accounting intern” as the subject line and include a cover letter in which you explain how a previous internship or experience has given you the skills to spend the summer with us at Kindling. Applications received without a cover letter don’t make it past round 1.

This internship is paid. If you’re looking for student credit, we’re open to speaking with your department about this possibility as well.