Setting up your Dialogue in five easy steps

One we've received your set-up requirements and deployed your Dialogue, the next step is to prepare your Dialogue ready for public launch. This can be achieved in five easy steps:

1) Logging in and getting accustomed with Dialogue

In order to log in, simply select the 'log in' option in the top right hand corner of the Dialogue. Your 'log in' name will be the same as the username you chose when signing up for Dialogue on the registration page. Once you are logged in, you will see extra links in the top of the page that will send you through to the various functions that you can use as an administrator.

2) Setting up your Dialogue team and moderation settings

The Dialogue Site Admin user will have been registered and promoted by a Delib customer success manager. This means that the user has a profile like any member of the public but with special admin privileges. Depending on internal resources it's helpful to set up additional admin users or moderators.  

To set up your team of moderators and administrators, you need to:

1. Ask them to register as users on the site, potentially under a naming convention to ensure moderators' comments and actions can be seen to be from the organisation.
2. Once they are registered they need to let you know their username (if not obvious).
3. Find their username in the Users page and change their user type from 'User' to either 'Moderator' or 'Site Admin' depending on the user's role.

We also have this article which explains how to set up admin users and moderators

Moderation settings

By default, moderation on Dialogue is set to ‘post-moderated’.  This means that new ideas and comments will be published straight to the site without prior intervention from you.  Administrators and moderators then have the ability to reject ideas and remove comments that are not suitable.  Setting the site to ‘pre-moderation’ means that all new ideas and comments have to be approved by a moderator or site admin before they will be visible on the public side of your site.

Find our more about the different user roles in Dialogue.

Registration form settings

If you wish to set what demographic questions are asked of all registering users, then you can ask us to add more questions to the registration form for you.

3) Editing your Dialogue ready for launch

You’ll need to add at least one challenge to get started; this will allow users to start adding ideas and comments. Find out how to add challenges.

As a rule of thumb, we suggest you start with no more than four or five challenges, as this will allow you to achieve a higher engagement rate across each one.  The most recently added challenges will appear at the top of the list on the homepage, so bear this in mind when setting up your Dialogue.

You could also add some ideas into your challenges.  This will inspire users to then go and add their own, but it will also allow you to set the tone for each challenge.  Adding topics to ideas coming in will enable users to find the ideas submitted on topics they may be interested in and help you with grouping topics for analysis.

There is demo content on the app which helps you to see how the site can be used, and this will need editing or deleting before your own challenges are launched. The following will need deleting prior to go-live: 

• Demo 'Ideas' challenge - this is here to show a challenge with an example idea and tag.

You can delete this from the challenge dashboard, more details on that in our Deleting challenges article.

• Demo 'Great - it's working!' idea - this shows how an idea sits within the 'Ideas' challenge. This will be removed once you remove the demo challenge as above, or it can be moderated out.

4) Editing static content prior to launch:

This refers to static pages that require your content in order to explain the challenges and how you are going to use the data, as well as your various policies. The pages listed below are all editable in Site Settings. These static pages contain default content which explains how they should be populated:

Some areas of Dialogue require copy provided by you:

• Home page introductory copy This is the copy which will go above the challenges on the front page of your Dialogue. Try to be brief and engaging, use it to introduce the public to your Dialogue, and to tell them more about how challenges and ideas work. Don’t be afraid to add links to other websites if you feel that they might benefit from any additional background information.
• AboutUse this page to provide detailed background information on the purpose of the Dialogue, such as the reasons you’re carrying out challenges and what you’re planning on doing with people’s ideas.  You can also tell people more about your organisation and the team running the challenges.
• Privacy policyWe’ve added some example copy on this page just to get you started.  You must customise and add to this with your organisation’s policies on privacy.
• Moderation policyThis is where you should outline your policy on site moderation.  This refers to the approach you take to the moderation of ideas and comments from your participants.  Things you should consider include: defining what content you class as offensive; advising users on what they should do if they find something offensive; and outlining what processes you take for moderation.

5) Launching your Dialogue

Once you are happy with the structure of how things are set up (and have written all of the content required above) then you can start to add challenges and promote these as required. You can access the wealth of advice in our Dialogue Success Guide to get ideas on writing good challenge content, promotion, moderation and many other things you might need.

Terminology: A Dialogue site can be home to one or multiple challenges. People submit ideas to challenges to help you to solve them or as a way to contribute to the discussion. Users can also read, rate, and comment on each others' ideas - helping you to generate solutions and actionable outcomes to your challenges.