Best Practice - Soft Launch
A soft launch is an initial exercise of the collaboration by a small number of participants selected for this purpose.
Who to select for Soft Launch:
- Participants who will have knowledgeable, valid ideas to contribute
- Participants whose ideas will likely represent a very diverse set of viewpoints, perhaps because they have different roles or functions
- Trusted advisors who will exercise the collaboration on time and provide feedback on the experience, both for your specific collaboration as well as for the platform in general
How many:
- At least three.
- You may only include yourself in soft launch if you meet the criteria above
- If you are launching to a larger audience you may have to up 5 participants in the soft launch
Soft Launch provides three benefits:
- Tests the collaboration to insure instructions are clear and there are no typographical errors
- Pre-populates a few valid responses per question so subsequent users can interact with existing responses
- Validates nature of the insights provided are of the appropriate nature and scope
Risks of Soft Launch:
- Participants don’t communicate findings
- Participants put in objectionable, nonsensical, banal or irrelevant responses
- Objectionable responses can be flagged as such
- Lower-quality responses generally do not resonate with the audience and will be largely ignored.
- Participants enter invalid responses to rating questions, inflating or deflating score results
Important notes for participants:
- Your soft launch is a critical step in the process. Be sure your participants understand this is a live collaboration and their responses will be shared with others in the collaboration.
- Always encourage the people involved in the soft launch to revisit the collaboration after others have submitted ideas, providing them the opportunity to review results, add more responses and interact with the ideas of others.