Preparing For a Successful Brainstorming Session

Hosting a successful brainstorming session can make or break a campaign or marketing plan. There can be long-term effects. So, when you're planning a brainstorming session and getting a bunch of people together that are giving you their valuable time. You need to make sure that you're properly prepared.

Be Specific
What you want to do is make sure that you're specific about what it is that you're brainstorming. It might be a specific campaign for a product or a service or it might be branding or an overall vision for a company. It could be all of those things.

Include The Right People
What you also need to think about is who do you need to invite? Who are the stake holders that really have in interest in making sure that this is successful? Invite those people. You might need to invite some people as dignitaries to the process and you also want to make sure that you also have different kinds of personalities both from your technical minds, to your legal minds, to the creative people also.

Venue
Choose a proper venue for brainstorming. If you work in an office everyday, it's usually a good idea to go outside somewhere. If you can't afford a hotel or a conference room on an outside place, look at different restaurants that have different rooms that they can close off for the amount of time for your brainstorming session. Think about these things or even if you have a friend that has a conference room that you could go and use. A lot of non-profit organizations do this for brainstorming sessions. They'll use the conference room of maybe one of their Board Members for example.

Creative ‘Toys’
The next thing you need to do to make sure that it's successful is to bring the right things to the brainstorming session. You want to make sure that you have notepads, pens, toys, crayons, sticky notes that are large and small both the small ones can be put on different areas of a white board or different huge, large Post-it notes but make sure that you bring a lot of those. Markers and make sure you also bring dry erase markers in case you have a white board. Some of these things may sound strange but it's always a good idea to bring things that help people get out of their daily rut and mindset and become creative.

Food and Drink!
One thing that I always do is make sure that I bring different kinds of food. I usually make sure that I bring sugary foods and candies and I also make sure that I also make sure that I bring salty things and these things to get people going and thinking and if it's not frowned upon by your organization, a lot of times alcohol like a good bottle of wine is wonderful for brainstorming.

Get there ahead of time and make sure you put these things out so that when your participants arrive, everything's set and ready to go. Before you get there, you also want to make sure that you set an agenda, type it up and have a copy for all your participants. Some of the things that should be included in your agenda are your overview of what it is that you're brainstorming, different presentations if you've asked other people to speak on different areas or different aspects. Breakout groups, assemble those ahead of time if you're going to plan on having them and also make sure that you have a note in there about having a parking lot for ideas that may not be related to the actual topic that you're brainstorming that day so that you can continue to rein and stick to the agenda. If you make sure that you do all of these things before a brainstorming session, they will help you have your sessions be even more successful.


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