5 steps to having great ideas with Neonce

Want to start a Neonce workshop for finding brilliant ideas but you’re afraid to do it yourself?

Worry no more, it’s easier than you think!

It doesn’t matter if you are a fundraiser trying to find new strategies for your charity’s Christmas appeal, an agile software development team, or working on an advertising campaign (or anywhere in-between!): just follow these 5 steps and you will be able to create a workshop that delivers great ideas.

Step 1: Sign in and create a new workshop

It all starts by creating a new workshop: sign in from the Neonce homepage (or create a new account, if don’t have one already - it’s free!) and click on the big button ‘Create a new workshop’, you can’t miss it!

When you click on 'Create a new workshop', the quick settings interface will pop up. This is a speedy way to set up a 1-hour workshop, but we advise you to click on the blue ‘Advanced settings’ button so you can better customise the length of your workshop.

Step 2: Write a good problem statement

Great ideas come from great questions. A problem well put is a problem half solved. I could go on, but you get the point: having a good problem statement is hugely important when kickstarting the creative process, and this is especially true when you are working in a team.

Remember that you are writing it for others, not yourself, so the information you provide should be easily understandable by all the group members.

Luckily, there are some easy-to-follow rules for making your problem statement clear and actionable. Here there are some suggestions taken from our article about for writing a problem statement:

1. Write the problem statement as a question (‘How might we..’, etc.)
2. Keep it short and simple!
3. Deal with only one problem at a time. If you have more problems, just run more workshops
4. If possible, define the problem’s boundaries. For example, ‘How might we increase the donations at our Christmas party by 20%?’ is better than ‘How can we raise more money?’.

When you are happy with your problem statement, write it in the ‘Problem statement or question’ field. You can also give the workshop a name and fill in more additional background, if you think it could be helpful.

Step 3: Invite the right people

In order to see the benefits of Neonce it’s best to do the workshop with other people - at least two others. You can include of course your usual team members, but look also for people with different background and expertises than your own.

Just like the ‘Anyone can cook’ motto from the Pixar movie Ratatouille, we firmly believe that everyone can have good ideas, and you increase the probability of finding something really original if you throw someone with a fresh perspective into the mix. A good number of participants is anything from 3 to 10.

How do you invite the participants? Super-easy: just write their emails addresses in the ‘Who are the participants?’ field and press ‘enter’. When you’ll finish the set-up they will receive an invitation by email.

Step 4: Set the timings

If your team is all ready and great ideas are about to erupt, then go with the default less-than-one-hour workshop. Otherwise, if you are working with a remote team or you just don’t know when all the participants will find some time to take part in the workshop, we suggest to take advantage of asynchronous collaboration: select the ‘Long - a few days or so’ option and let each phase last for one whole day, so it does not matter if you are online together.

Step 5: How many ideas do you share between phases?

The last step of the advanced settings is to decide how many cards are selected in each phase. We recommend sticking to the default values. Share 5 ideas in the create and elevate phases, and 4 in the select phase. If you are doing a workshop with more people, for example 10, reduce the number of selected cards to 3 in each phase, so to avoid information overload - 50 ideas is too much for us humble humans to process!

Now click on ‘Create workshop’ to finish the set-up. The invite email will be immediately sent to all the participants and you can start adding great ideas. Hooray!

Get in touch

We love receiving feedback from you! With your comments and suggestions we can continuously improve Neonce, so please drop us a line at hello@neonce.com. We loving reading every email our users write to us!

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