Collaborative suggestion box for employee ideas?

December 29, 2014 9:43 AM

What are good tools for an online employee "suggestion box" to gather and collaborate on product innovation ideas? Rather than a one-way box, would be great to have features to allow people to build on one another's ideas, comment and vote, and avoid duplication. Anonymous and non-anonymous participation would be nice.
posted by CruiseSavvy to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

A forum is usually a great way to have this type of collaboration. If your company uses SharePoint or Salesforce, you can use the collaboration tools (SharePoint comes with Yammer, Salesforce comes with Chatter) or one of the many, many online forums available.
posted by xingcat at 10:04 AM on December 29, 2014

http://spring.me/?
posted by oceanjesse at 10:27 AM on December 29, 2014

I agree that a forum would work for this.

If you end up using something like Chatter or Yammer that is tied into existing IDs and won't allow anonymity, you could allow people to submit anon questions to a designated employee (maybe by Google form or something) who would post them on the forum to get the conversation started.
posted by radioamy at 10:30 AM on December 29, 2014

Best answer: We use Google Moderator for a lot of things at work. It's not perfect and the interface is not especially pretty, but it has all of the features you ask for and it's simple and straightforward.
posted by brainmouse at 11:02 AM on December 29, 2014 [1 favorite]

You might look into a platform like Huddle.
posted by Emperor SnooKloze at 11:07 AM on December 29, 2014

My company mascot has an email account for which everyone has login privileges. When people want to broach difficult topics or make anonymous suggestions, they use the mascot's account. Via reply all, a community conversation typically ensues. People can participate as themselves or via the mascot account if they want to maintain anonymity. We're a friendly place, so no one uses the account to snipe others. (I can see all account usage, although not who originates emails.)
posted by carmicha at 12:07 PM on December 29, 2014

Google moderator is the right answer, I think.
posted by empath at 12:12 PM on December 29, 2014