Our mission is to make software that people enjoy using. Historically, we’ve focused much of our energies on the participant of Kindling, making it fun and easy—no training required easy—to submit, discuss, and vote on ideas. This emphasis has been very much by design, as the more powerful and complex features useful for evaluating large quantities of ideas are only useful if you first have a large quantity of ideas. And you’ll only ever have a large quantity of ideas to deal with if your community is actively engaged.
(Our approach stands in contrast to our competitors, who have chosen to build advanced features with the associated complexity for evaluating large quantities of ideas, and now are trying to backfill simplicity and usability into their applications. This is a difficult, if not impossible, knot to untie.)
While well-designed for the participant, Kindling hasn’t been particularly easy to use as a decision-maker. And our customers have not been shy about letting us know this. Given our mission, this is unacceptable. The essential difficulty has been that Kindling forced moderators—people responsible for progressing ideas through the decision-making funnel—to deal with one… idea… at… a… time. And this, particularly for larger, more engaged communities, doesn’t scale.
Kindling. Software decision-makers enjoy using.
With the newest version of Kindling, we’ve focused our design energies on supporting the people responsible for moderating a community. Most importantly, moderators can now take action on any number of ideas at once. They can approve the winning 4 ideas from a Campaign with one action, and decline the remaining 47 ideas in another. They can shut down a Category and move all 74 ideas to another active Category in one action. And they can comment on 5 promising ideas at once, with one action.
Take action on many ideas at once.
We’ve also made Kindling smart enough to understand that taking action on 47 ideas is 1 action, so we don’t flood the feed with repetitive messages or your inbox with 47 emails, but smartly roll them up into one, clear message. We have a strong understanding that the people who use Kindling are incredibly busy, and we design to respect their time and manage the signal-to-noise ratio on their behalf.
Screenshot of the feed when multiple ideas have been changed
The feed for a single comment on many ideas.
We’ve learned a lot working with our customers over the last few years, and one of the most important truths we’ve discovered is that active, transparent decision-making is the key to the long-term health of the innovation program. Decisions are the energy that sustains a community, and communicating the reasoning behind decisions keeps people coming back for more. On the other end of the spectrum is the dreaded void—Whatever happened to that awesome idea I shared with management…? And by designing specifically for the moderator’s experience—by making it as easy to evaluate, decide, and act on ideas as it is to contribute them—we’ve invested in that long-term health of your program.
We’re really excited about this important update to Kindling, and would love the opportunity to walk you through it. Contact us today to check out software that your people will actually enjoy using. And by all means, compare Kindling to our competitors, we’re confident you’ll find that there’s no comparison.