There are a few elements of an engagement that experience has shown us get used over and over again. To make this a little easier for leaders we’ve created the option to add templates for survey questions, participation groups, objectives, and theme sets for a particular room. Each of these templates lives under the “Room settings” menu in (unsurprisingly) the tab labeled “Templates”. This article covers your options for each kind of template.
Having an option set up as a template in your room means that leaders can apply it to their engagements with just a couple of clicks, instead of manually typing it out every time they need to use it.
A couple of notes:
- Only admins and leaders who have been given the “Manage templates” permission for a room can manage templates except for theme set templates, which any leader can create and edit.
- Once a template has been created, it is available for all leaders in the room to use - regardless of their permissions.
Survey Questions
At a glance, survey questions and participation groups may look exactly the same, but they do very different things for your engagement. If you would like to learn more about the differences between survey questions and participation groups, please click here.
Your account can have up to 10 survey question templates. To create a new template, click into the Survey questions tab, then click the “Add template” button and enter the question and response options desired. Click “Save” to save the template and come back to edit it at any time.
Note: Editing the template will only affect how it is applied to FUTURE engagements. Engagements created previously will be unaffected.
Once created, the survey question template can be added to any engagement from Step 2 (Survey questions) of the draft by clicking the “Select template” option in the relevant area.
Participation Groups
At a glance, survey questions and participation groups may look exactly the same, but they do very different things for your engagement. If you would like to learn more about the differences between survey questions and participation groups, please click here.
Your account can have up to 10 participation group templates. To create a new template, click into the Participation Groups tab and then the “Add template” button. Enter the question and response options desired. Click “Save” to save the template and come back to edit it at any time.
Note: Editing the template will only affect how it is applied to FUTURE engagements. Engagements created previously will be unaffected.
Once created, the participation groups template can be added to any engagement by clicking into the Settings of the draft, then clicking to open the Participation Groups tab. Toggle the setting to ‘On’ and then click ‘Select template’. Choose the template you wish to use and then click ‘Apply’ to save your changes before exiting the Settings menu.
Objectives
If leaders in a room will be running a series of engagements on the same topic or as part of the same project, it makes sense to create an objective to group those engagements. Organizing around objectives is a great way to keep organized and on top of engagements that need planning or follow-up.
Leaders can create up to 10 Objective templates for a room and once these objectives are applied to engagements, they will appear at the top of the list in the Objectives filter in the main Engagements view. Click “Save” to save the template and come back at any time to edit it. Once created, objective templates can be added to any engagement from Step 1 (Exchange/survey details) of your draft. Objective templates will appear at the top of the Objective drop-down list.
Note: Editing the template will only affect how it is applied to FUTURE engagements. Engagements created previously will be unaffected.
Theme Sets (Exchanges only)
To streamline the analysis step and capture topics that are consistent across Exchanges, leaders can create templated theme sets. Once a theme set template is applied to an Exchange, it automatically themes the results.
Leaders can create up to 30 theme set templates for a room with up to 19 themes in each set and up to 100 keywords in each theme. Click “Save” to save the template and come back at any time to edit it.
Note: Editing the template will affect all open and active Exchanges. Closed Exchanges will not be impacted.
Tip: Depending on your account, ThoughtExchange offers pre-populated theme set templates for common Exchange topics. You can add a ThoughtExchange theme set to your room by clicking ‘Add template’ and then selecting ‘Copy from’. Select a theme set under the ‘ThoughtExchange’ heading to add it to your Room.
Once created, theme set templates can be added to any Exchange in that room by clicking the Apply button within the Theme sets tab. Clicking Apply opens up a dialog box where Exchanges can be selected.
Theme set templates applied to an Exchange will appear automatically in the Topics visualization in the Results Dashboard for that Exchange. As more thoughts come in, the theming will be updated.
Once the Exchange is closed, leaders can edit the thoughts within each theme by using the Edit Results tab. Copy the dynamic version by selecting the “Options” button, choosing the “Duplicate theme set” option, giving it a unique name, and then selecting the theme set template of interest. Once the copy is created, it can be edited as normal. Click here to learn more about the Edit Results tool.
Creating a theme set template from a manually-created theme set
You can also create a theme set template using a theme set you've built for one of your Exchanges. Simply click "Options" and select "Copy as template." This will create a new theme set template in the templates menu (complete with AI suggested keywords) that can be edited as normal.
Copying Templates Across Rooms
Templates created in one room can be copied to another room on the same account using the "Copy from" option that appears when a leader clicks the "Add template" button.
Templates are visible across rooms on the same account by default, but can be made private by clicking the checkbox labeled "Make template private to this room" in the creation menu.
If you have any questions about this or any other feature, feel free to drop us a line at help@thoughtexchange.com.