Use Slido to help your team brainstorm their strategy, identify projects for the next quarter or crowdsource topics for upcoming events.
And with Slido’s Ideas poll, you can ask AI to sort and organize submitted ideas into common categories or themes. This allows you to use your valuable meeting time for discussions and next steps – instead of simply collecting input.
In this guide, you will learn how to use Slido to make your brainstorming sessions more effective, regardless of whether your team is remote or in the room.
Common challenges
Fear of rejection
- Social anxiety: Often meeting attendees worry about what others might think about their idea so they either choose to conform or remain silent.
- Power dynamics: A few assertive individuals can dominate the discussion, whereas quiet thinkers or junior team members might be overlooked.
Lack of productivity
- Limiting idea generation: Ideation can be cut short due to time restraints, which may limit you to just the “good enough” ideas.
- Not enough space for discussion: The higher the number of participants, the less time there is for individuals to share their ideas.
- Prioritization and organization: It’s difficult to know how best to evaluate, prioritize and organize the collected ideas.
Difficulty facilitating
- Poor organization during the session: People can often talk over one another and get off topic.
- Involving the whole team: It isn’t easy keeping everyone engaged and focused on the objective of the meeting.
- Lack of action plan: Although you may have great discussion, making clear decisions and deciding on next steps can be challenging.
How Slido can help
Enable team confidence
- Create a safe space: Slido enables meeting attendees to submit and upvote ideas anonymously (or with their name) ensuring fair and objective treatment.
- Improve group dynamics: Everyone can contribute regardless of their role or status, no matter where they are joining from or how shy they might be.
Productive brainstorming
- Leverage asynchronous communication: Give the group the space to think through and submit ideas before the meeting starts.
- Collect and organize ideas quicker: Crowdsource and organize the ideas at scale, leaving more time for the decision-making and discussion.
- Identify the best ideas: Voting on the top ideas allows you to identify the best best ones quickly and democratically.
Easier to facilitate
- Easier for participants to follow and engage: Active involvement and full visibility of the team’s ideas allows everyone to engage and keep track of the discussion.
- Easier to agree on next steps: Slido safely captures all data so you can revisit the collected input anytime and decide on the next steps
Polls and templates
Ideas poll
Ask your team to submit their ideas on any topic you choose.
Why use it?
An ideas poll can help you collect input from your team on any topic of your choosing. Not only can participants submit their own ideas, they can also add emoji reactions to others. This shows which ideas resonate with people in real time.
Examples:
- Which topics should we discuss during the product meeting?
- Which areas of business can we improve over the summer?
- Which features should we definitely work on in the next three months?
Pro tip: Use Slido AI categorization to organize your list of ideas in seconds. No more manually identifying themes or similar ideas, which means your team can move forward faster.
Ranking poll
Give your team a list of options and ask them to rank or prioritize them.
Why use it?
Once you’ve collected ideas from your team, you can use the ranking poll to make final decisions or decide on an action plan. Do you need to move ahead with a project and identify the next steps? Or make a team decision quickly and democratically? Put the considered options into a poll and let your participants rank their top choices. You’ll then have instant consensus.
Examples:
- Rank these meeting objective from most to least important
- Prioritize these ideas from most to least impactful for our users
- Order these marketing channels from most to least valuable
Curious about more?
