Quick start guide for IdeaKeep — idea management bot for Slack

7 min readSep 17, 2018

IdeaKeep — is an idea management chatbot for the messaging platform as Slack.

Summary

Our little story
Why use IdeaKeep and idea management tools
How to install
Onboarding tutorial

A little story

In 2017 we were working on another project — a chatbot for teachers and students, where you can give grades, homework, and make tests.

But there was a raw prototype and project didn’t have success.

I met a guy in the incubator of the Higher School of Economic, he said — let’s turn this project into something for business. And in the chat room we created for teachers there was a function — anonymous questions to the teacher. Well, we decided to turn this function into a separate bot. In two weeks we made a prototype, lending, got into a Slack App Directory and applied for a couple of accelerators. And suddenly people began to install, the project began to grow.

In 2018 we were accelerated by @NUMA, because Numa has great competence in consulting on the idea management with such client as Leroy Merlin, Sberbank, and so on.

Why use Idea management bot?

Idea Generation is the first step in Idea & Innovation management.

IF:

you have lots of great ideas, but most of them are lost
existing platform is inconvenient and complicated
you need a brainstorm and an immediate decision
you want to increase workflow and collaboration
employees don’t want to express their opinions
not all of the teammates are involved in the process
you are looking for business growth
your process of innovation is slow
you don’t know what to suggest
there is a lack of development
you need to eliminate chaos
you have lack of good ideas

You need something to avoid stress and low productivity for you and your team.

Many idea management tools represent a separate platform, but we believe that ideation and brainstorming should be implemented into your real and everyday workflow.

Install

There are 3 ways to install IdeaKeep:

Use /apps ideakeep command in your Slack workplace
Visit Website ideakeep.me

On the website you should click on Add to Slack button, sign in into your Slack workplace and Authorize IdeaKeep access to it.

2. Visit App Directory for Slack

You can directly visit our page on the directory via this link

Or you can use Search and tap “IdeaKeep”

After install you will be redirected in the Thank you page.

What’s next?

Channel Ideakeep-box is created by Ideakeep bot

Opening your Slack workplace you will notice that IdeaKeep has created a channel. Ideakeep commands are enabled in all your channels, you don’t need to connect it.

And you have 2 new messages from IdeaKeep bot.

Open it!

IdeaKeep tells you about the main features:

And suggest you Add your first idea, but we will return to it later

Main menu

/ideakeep command shows the main menu only for the person who use this command:

This is where everything starts and can be managed.

Here you can start ideate, show ideas (the same as use /ideakeep-list command) and Export your ideas.

Remember that all commands work in the context of one channel where this command was used. It means you will have the list of ideas in this channel, you will export ideas from this channel. It helps better categorize ideas and projects. If you want to export or review all ideas from all channels, send relevant command in the direct message to @ideakeep bot

How Add an Idea?

An idea can be added by all teammates who have installed IdeaKeep bot.

Use the ‘Add idea’ button from welcome message to add your first idea.

Next time, you can use /ideakeep-add command

When you Add an Idea:

Name your idea — it should be a clear and short title
Select channel where you would like to show your added idea
If you like to stay anonymous, switch Idea author to Anonymously

You can create a Text idea or an Idea on the color Sticker (yellow, blue, pink). It helps setting categories to your ideas, or you can imagine another filter ;)
In Description, you should be more specific and describe what do you suggest and why it will be useful. Try to be convincible and use strong arguments.

Lifehack: you can also type /ideakeep-add <idea text> and the bot will automatically open pre-filled Add idea form.

What else?

Using IdeaKeep bot you can not only add ideas.

After adding an idea, all channel members will see your idea and some action buttons:

Everybody could vote for an idea by clicking on Like. The number into the brackets will help evaluate how much your colleagues love it or not.

Every idea could be discussed in Thread:

Click View thread to see discussion log

You can organize brainstorm, collect more ideas or improve initial suggestion.

All team members can participate in the discussion, can add reaction to messages, or even turn a message into New Idea.

Turn message into a New idea

Click on three points and choose to Add idea.

Ideakeep bot will open Add form with your message in the description field. You need only add Idea Name :)

Suggest idea

If you need more inspiration, you can use Suggest command /ideakeep-suggest or Suggest ideas button

Suggest feature is based on AI and show you relevant results from Google service Talk To Books.

List of added ideas

Use /ideakeep-list command to show ideas list in the channel.

The list is only visible for you and you can sort ideas by likes or by date of the last update.

If you want to read the discussion, like or view one specific idea, click on Jump to idea link

Search

You can search for ideas by keyword.

Use /ideakeep-search command + keyword. For ex., I’d like to find Idea including the word “pink”, I’ll use /ideakeep-search pink command and that will be the result: