The most common reason idea campaigns produce underwhelming results is not a bad question. It is the wrong audience. Either too broad (everyone gets invited, most people feel it does not apply to them), or too narrow (only the obvious experts, who give the expected answers).
This worksheet helps you think through your audience deliberately before you hit send on a single invitation.
Why Audience Matters More Than Question
A perfect question asked to the wrong audience is useless. A decent question asked to the right people, including a few unexpected ones, can change the direction of a project.
The people with the most useful process improvement ideas are usually the people who live with the broken process every day. Not the people who designed it. Not the managers who review the output. The people who work around the problem, quietly, every single shift, and have been doing so for years.
Your job when planning an audience is to find those people and make it easy for them to contribute.
The Four Audience Types
Subject matter experts
The people who know the process, product, or problem in depth. They bring technical credibility and can evaluate whether an idea is feasible. Their risk is tunnel vision. They often know why something cannot be done because they have tried before.
End users and frontline workers
The people who experience the problem daily. They often have the most specific, actionable insight. Their ideas tend to be practical because they have immediate feedback loops. Their risk is that they sometimes optimize for their own workflow rather than the broader system.
Adjacent departments
People who interact with the problem area but do not own it. Procurement seeing something that R&D misses. Maintenance seeing something that production does not. These cross-functional perspectives often surface solutions that feel obvious once someone says them out loud.
Wild cards
People with no obvious connection to the challenge, but who bring fresh eyes. Someone from a completely different function who solved a similar problem in a different context. A newer employee who has not learned to accept the current situation as fixed. A customer who experiences the output of your process but not the process itself.
You do not need huge numbers of each. A few high-quality contributors from each category will outperform a large group of people who were not sure why they were invited.
The Audience Planning Worksheet
Work through these five questions before finalizing your invitation list.
Step 1: Who lives closest to this problem?
Name the specific teams, roles, or individuals who deal with the problem on a daily or weekly basis. These people should be on your list regardless of seniority.
Write it out: The people who experience this problem most directly are [list teams and roles].
Step 2: Who sees the output but not the process?
Who receives the result of the process or product you are improving, without being responsible for producing it? Their perspective is unfiltered by ownership.
Write it out: The people downstream who see what we produce but not how we produce it are [list teams and roles].
Step 3: Who solved something similar elsewhere?
Think across departments, across business units, across supplier relationships. Is there someone who has dealt with a parallel challenge in a different context?
Write it out: Someone who has dealt with a similar problem in a different context is [name or team].
Step 4: Who would surprise you?
Name one person who would not normally be on this list but who might have an angle you have not considered. A customer. A supplier. A new hire who came from a company that does this differently.
Write it out: One person who would not normally be invited but might surprise us is [name or role].
Step 5: Who has relevant knowledge but rarely speaks up?
Think about your organization. Who knows things that never make it into meetings? Quiet operators. Long-tenured technicians. People in roles that are not usually asked for input. These are often your best contributors if you give them a comfortable way to participate.
Write it out: People who have relevant knowledge but rarely get asked are [list roles and teams].
Open vs. Targeted Campaigns
Once you have your audience picture, decide whether this campaign should be open to the whole organization or targeted to a specific group.
Choose open when the problem is broad enough that almost anyone could have a useful perspective, when you want to build a culture of participation over time, or when volume and diversity of input matters more than depth.
Choose targeted when the problem is specific and requires knowledge to engage meaningfully, when you need a high signal-to-noise ratio, or when you have limited bandwidth to evaluate a large number of submissions.
You can also do both. Start with a targeted campaign to get your best ideas, then open a broader conversation once you have promising threads to follow.
How to Estimate Volume
A realistic benchmark: in a well-run targeted campaign, 20 to 40 percent of invited participants will submit something. In a broad open campaign across a whole organization, expect 5 to 15 percent participation.
If you invite 200 people and expect 15 percent engagement, plan to evaluate roughly 30 submissions. Knowing this upfront helps you plan your evaluation process before the campaign closes, not after.
If your expected volume is above 100 submissions, you need a triage process ready to go before you launch. See our guide on triaging 100 or more ideas in two hours for a practical approach to that.
