Throughout the duration of your challenge, there may come times when you want to send a message to the people participating.  You may want to notify them of a change in your evaluation process.  Or, you may want to tell your top five ideas that they’ve won the challenge.  Whatever it is, the “Send Message” feature is a great way to quickly communicate.

Sending a message (Option 1 – In Brainstorm)

Note: The recipients of the message depend on the current filter settings of the grid.  So, if your grid is filtered to only show “Ideas with at least 3 stars,” it will only show that subset of ideas.  If you want to send a message to all of your participants, make sure to remove any filters by clicking “modify filters.”

• Just below the grid area, click the “Send Message” icon.
• Select which group of participants you’d like to communicate to:
  • Team Leaders Only – This option will send a message to the one person on each idea team that is designated as the “team leader.”  By default, this is the submitter of the idea, but some teams do change it.
  • All Idea Team Members – This option will send a message to everyone that is on a team whose idea is submitted to your challenge.
• Type your message.
• Click “Send” (you will receive a copy of this message in your inbox as well).

By taking advantage of the grid filtering feature, you can use this mechanism to create lists of participants you want to communicate with.   For example, you could create a list of “all idea team leaders who haven’t answered a specific question” or “all team members who have joined the challenge since a certain date.”   

Sending a message (Option 2 – In your Email Client)

On occasion, you may have reason to want to send a rather complex email with things like pictures and attachments.  That’s not the sort of thing that Brainstorm is good at, but your email client (Outlook, Gmail, etc.) is.  So, we’ve made it easy to copy the email addresses from Brainstorm and paste them into your email client.

• While in the “Send Message” workflow, click “show email addresses.”
• In the area that expands, highlight the list of email addresses and copy them to your computer’s clipboard
  
  
  • There are many ways to copy text like hitting Ctrl+C or right-clicking and then selecting “Copy"
• Paste the email addresses into your email client
  • There are many ways to paste text like hitting Ctrl+V or right-clicking and then selecting “Paste”