Best Practice - Number of Prompts in a Collaboration

Number of Prompts and Adaptive Conversations

Best Practices for asynchronous data collection indicates that participation and creativity of responses is best for the first three open-ended questions. After three, the quality and quantify of responses dips and then drops quickly after 5 open-ended questions. That holds true for any collection mechanism, even surveys

With CrowdSmart, every open-ended prompt is followed by an exercise to review Ideas submitted by other participants. Plus, a collaboration with multiple open-ended prompts, ends with a final Overall Ranking exercise to review a subset of ideas from all the open-ended prompts.

Thus, we strongly recommend that a single collaboration have only one open-ended question unless there is a very compelling reason. Notable Exceptions: Start, Stop, Continue, and SWOT are recognized frameworks containing closely related questions.

A better approach is to ask one broad question, discover the answer, and then follow with a collaboration built around your findings. this is called Adaptive Conversations.