IdeaScale - Harnessing The Power of Crowdsourcing

Pioneering Positive Change in South Africa

In an era defined by connectivity and collaboration, the transformative potential of crowdsourcing software emerges to drive positive change and foster a brighter future for South African citizens. At IdeaScale, we are passionate about harnessing the collective intelligence of diverse stakeholders to create impactful solutions that address the world's most pressing challenges.

After establishing ourselves as industry leaders in the United States, IdeaScale has expanded globally to act as a catalyst for change worldwide. We are proud to offer transformative government-to-citizen (G2C) crowdsourcing solutions tailored to the needs of South African government organisations.

Possible Solutions For The South African Government

When organisations need a streamlined, trackable, and efficient way to collect ideas, they bring in IdeaScale. South African government organisations face a range of complex challenges that our crowdsourcing solution can help address. Some of the major issues include:

• Service delivery improvement: National departments, provincial departments, and municipalities all often struggle to efficiently deliver services to citizens, leading to inefficiencies, delays, and frustration among the public. Whether you’re needing to improve water service delivery or solve public transportation inefficiencies, IdeaScale can facilitate citizen feedback mechanisms to gather real-time insights, identify pain points, and prioritise areas for improvement.

• Policy formulation: Crowdsourcing software can facilitate collaborative policymaking processes, allowing government organisations to solicit feedback, gather ideas, and incorporate diverse perspectives into policy formulation and decision-making processes.

• Budgetary limitations: IdeaScale is commonly used to help organisations effectively identify cost-saving measures, solutions, and alternative funding sources to address resource constraints and optimise budget allocation.

• Transparency and accountability: Ensuring transparency and accountability is essential for departments and municipalities to build trust and legitimacy among citizens. IdeaScale provides a platform for open communication, data sharing, and collaborative problem-solving. IdeaScale guides you from ideation to implementation, making the innovation process transparent for all users.

• Community engagement and participation: Building strong, inclusive communities requires active engagement and participation from citizens in the decision-making process. IdeaScale empowers employees or citizens to contribute their ideas, expertise, and feedback on issues that matter to them, fostering greater civic engagement, participation, and empowerment within communities.

IdeaScale Solutions For The United States

Every year, the President of the United States puts out an open call out to all federal employees inviting them to publicly submit their money-saving ideas online using IdeaScale technology. This call is promoted by various branches, departments and organisations within the government encouraging employees to share their thoughts on the subject.

The ideas are submitted, users vote the ideas up and down and the best ideas are identified. The Office of Management and Budget then narrows down the best ideas to a “final four” which can be viewed and voted on by the American public. The winner is granted the honour of presenting his or her idea to the President in Washington, DC.

Over five years, 90 000 ideas were submitted by tens of thousands of government employees and 500 000 votes were cast, ensuring that the top ideas were identified, developed, and implemented. Overall, $20 000 000 in savings were generated from the top ideas to help the government operate more efficiently and effectively.

IdeaScale Solutions For NASA

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is a United States government agency that is responsible for science and technology related to air and space. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the US in March 2020, NASA’s workforce expressed their desire to help combat COVID-19.

NASA launched an internal, agency-wide call for ideas called NASA@WORK using IdeaScale’s crowdsourcing software. The campaign focused on three challenge areas: personal protective equipment, ventilation devices, and monitoring and forecasting of the spread and impacts of the virus.

NASA@WORK ideas added value to several projects, including one using NASA’s supercomputing capability to advance research for treatments and a vaccine, as well as offering AI expertise to develop new data mining techniques for answering high-priority questions related to COVID-19. Other ideas informed efforts that have led to new virus tracking and forecast modelling apps, 3D printed masks and other PPE equipment, impact visualisations, NASA-modified ventilators, sensors for virus detection, and more.

IdeaScale For The United States Coast Guard

The United States Coast Guard (USCG) is a branch of the United States Armed Forces responsible for protecting US waterways, ports and shorelines by enforcing US laws and serving as a first responder on the water. The Coast Guard had a clear challenge - they needed a way to find great ideas out in the fleet and be able to communicate those ideas to decision-makers to solve the problems. Before IdeaScale, the USCG used a SharePoint spreadsheet as a large database of ideas where users could view submissions—but they couldn’t add comments to them, collaborate on projects, or find ways to easily put ideas into action. They needed a better approach.

The Coast Guard brought in IdeaScale in 2015, and has been using the platform ever since. And what impact have they had? Their crowdsourcing efforts have saved lives. In 2017, the US experienced one of the worst hurricane seasons on record, and the Coast Guard found themselves mired in slow, outdated lessons learned processes for sharing best practices.

To modernise how they shared information, the Coast Guard launched a “Hurricane Lessons Learned” campaign through their CG_Ideas@Work crowdsourcing platform. Instead of disparate emails, text messages, and even, yes-pen and paper, members could now share ideas in a single place, regardless of geography. As a result, hurricane first responders shared life-saving ideas with each other.

For example, one member shared an idea to monitor social media after seeing distress signals on Instagram. Another shared an idea for better mobile tech in disaster areas. Another shared an idea to improve location targeting. The list went on and on, and the result was better service to the American people in times of emergency.

The IdeaScale Difference

Top government organisations choose IdeaScale time and time again, but not only because of our proven track record of driving innovative change. We’re a trusted partner for top government organisations because we operate with the highest level of security to safeguard valuable data and ensure compliance with acts like POPIA (Protection of Personal Information Act). We focus on the customer journey and offer professional training for clients early in their innovation journeys. This commitment extends to providing exceptional customer service, ensuring a seamless journey for every user with 24/7 assistance and dedicated Customer Success Managers.

Global Partnerships and Collaborations

In the arena of global partnerships and collaborative endeavours, IdeaScale emerges as a catalyst for worldwide innovation and progress. Operating on a global scale, IdeaScale extends its transformative platform to

empower individuals and organisations across continents, enabling them to crowdsource solutions and collectively forge a brighter future. Empowering diverse communities worldwide to collaborate, innovate, and shape a better tomorrow remains our core mission as IdeaScale continues to expand its global reach.

Building A Better Future Together

From communicating life-saving best practices, to advancing research for a vaccine for a global pandemic, the impact your ideas can have is limitless. At IdeaScale, we’re committed to helping build a better future by empowering your citizens or employees to share their ideas and insights. If there’s one thing we’ve learned from the millions of ideas submitted through our solution over the years, it’s that the brightest ideas can come from anyone, anywhere, at any time.

What impact can your organisation make?

Let us help you find out. Contact us to learn more about IdeaScale's G2C solutions: https://ideascale.com/?utm_campaign=Public%20Sector%20Leaders&utm_source=PSLPublication