If you are the system administrator for your Decision.io review process, this post is for you. There’s a lot to this post, but your role is a mission critical one and I’d hate to leave you without all of the information you need. I recommend you bookmark this post and refer to it if you’re ever unsure of what to do. Of course, if your question isn’t answered here you can always send us a message and we’ll help you as quickly as possible.
Here’s a summary of what’s covered:
If you are using Decision.io to review submissions, you will want to bookmark this post. All of the major features that you can take advantage of as a reviewer are outlined below.
This comprehensive tutorial is made up of five sections:
By the end of this tutorial, you will have seen and learned of just about everything you’ll need to know to start reviewing. Of course, if anything is unclear or you have any questions whatsoever, please reach out in the comments below or via email.
Let’s get started!
Image is from the original article written by Trish Crompton at the Communitech Hub.
At Decision.io, we do things differently than most startups.
We didn’t go for funding right off the bat. The team worked full-time at incubators and accelerators and came aboard full time as needed. We bootstrapped. It’s not the way you’re necessarily advised to do things in a startup world where a sizable round of VC funding is the holy grail.
Fortunately, we don’t really care. The way we’re doing things has led to the best in class team decision-making platform, and customer service that would blow you away. Oh yeah, people have been more than happy to pay for Decision.io since the beginning of our beta. Unconventional is just fine when it’s working.
The last to make the leap to joining full time is Duncan McDowell, manager of the startup services group at the Communitech Hub in Kitchener-Waterloo. Check out this great Q & A featuring Duncan McDowell, where he dishes out some priceless startup advice and speaks about his ambition to build Decision.io into a billion-dollar company.
We’re almost there! By there I mean we’ve almost completed an entire stage of a submission review process together. Of course, this is just one stage of a review process that I created. Decision.io is meant to be flexible, so don’t worry if your review process looks a bit different.
Today, I’ll show you how to move the submissions that will be continuing on in your review process to the next stage, and how to stop submissions that aren’t successful. My next post will show you how to send customized feedback to every applicant, and that will more or less wrap up the major tasks you’ll complete in a typical review process!
If I’m losing you here, it’s probably because you’re just joining us now. Peruse the links below to get up to speed.
Alright, let’s get to it!
If you are a decision maker, or aspire to have such a responsibility in your career, this post is for you.
Daniel Kahneman is a winner of a Nobel Prize. He is the author of, Thinking, Fast and Slow, the book where many of these ideas are shared. You can actually read the book for free in PDF here. Much of what dictates today’s decision-making strategies are born out of the ideas of Kahneman himself. If I had to pick one human being in this world to listen to on matters concerning decision-making strategy, Daniel Kahneman is that individual. He has dedicated his life to this and it shows.
So, let’s get into it and supercharge your decision-making abilities!
Today, we get into the meat and potatoes of Decision.io. We are going to go into the full submission and take a look at our core features including rating, commenting, note taking, and ranking. This is where the organization that Decision.io adds to the online submission management and group decision-making process becomes apparent.
If you’re joining in on our series of product feature posts for the first time, I recommend you take a look at some of the posts below.
Ok, let’s jump into the fun stuff!
Unconventional advice has a special place in my heart. It seems more genuine. I feel like unconventional advice is born out of experience — often difficult experiences. Conventional advice on the other hand is easily echoed. Too often conventional advice isn’t well thought out but rather repeated because many other smart people have shared this advice in the past.
So with that I give you four pieces of unconventional business advice. Words from some of the brightest minds of the past and present.
If you can’t tell yet, we here at Decision.io are firmly against the “gut decision” when the decision is of the complex and critical variety. We’re against it, and we don’t apologize.
These 6 steps of a sound decision-making process will give you everything you need to know about the entire decision-making process. Stop leaving decisions, the cornerstone of success, to chance!
In today’s post, I am going to show you how to import your online submissions into Decision.io for review. Today’s example assumes you are importing from .CSV and therefore not using our Wufoo integration.
You will be amazed by how easy it is to go from an intimidating spreadsheet to a user friendly online submission review environment.
If you’re new here, you may want to browse the following links to get caught up in this Decision.io walk through series.
Great! Now let’s get going with today’s tutorial. This is where the fun begins!
The gut decision divides decision makers everywhere. Some decision makers swear that their gut can do them no wrong and that pouring over data sets and applying decision models is busy work. Others demand a more rigorous approach to decision making and dismiss gut decisions as a viable strategy altogether.
Who’s right?
Well, it depends. Sometimes, making a quick decision based on your gut is the best approach. Other times, you put yourself at risk by failing to collect and analyze relevant data before making a final decision. So, let’s take a closer look at when you should and shouldn’t trust your gut decision. Continue reading
Wufoo is an easy to use drag and drop form builder and we integrate with it! For those of you collecting and reviewing online submissions and applications, that means that every time someone submits an application using your Wufoo form, all of that data is automatically imported, organized and ready for review within Decision.io. For an integration so powerful, it’s amazing how easy it is!
If you’re here for the first time, welcome! You may want to browse the three posts that precede this one. I’ve provided a link to each of those below for your convenience.
Now that we’re on the same page, let’s dive head first into this Wufoo integration, shall we? The word “integration” is much more intimidating than the actual process of integrating, I promise. Continue reading
A recent Inc. article titled, Why B2B Startups Are Suddenly So Sexy, declared that B2B software companies are finally being seen as sexy by some investors. That’s all well and good. However, the biggest issue has never been investors failing to perceive the allure of a meaty B2B solution. Afterall, great B2B companies tend to generate revenue before a major round of funding anyway!
The real problem is that people looking to start a B2B company and people who have already started one don’t think they themselves are sexy. They look longingly at their B2C comrades. Their Twitter followings are in the thousands. They are getting covered on all of the major tech sites. Their blogs are littered with comments. Every slight tweak to the app is met with praise from the young and hip around the world.
B2B software companies would probably describe their company as producing something useful, practical, and better than what is currently being used. But definitely not sexy.
Well fellow B2B software companies and those aspiring to join the ranks, I am going to help you hold your head up a little higher around those boastful B2C’s!
An important part of adopting new cloud-based submission management software is ensuring that your current process can be carried over to this new platform. Not only should you be able to carry it over, but it should be quick and easy to do so. We know that if it’s difficult to even get this new platform up and running it just isn’t worth the hassle of switching.
We get it! We’re living in a time when it’s becoming more common for technology to just plain work. You expect it, and you have every right to expect this much.
In last week’s post, I showed you how to set up a custom review process. This week’s post will take you through the system administration menu. In coming posts I’ll show you how to supercharge your Decision.io experience by enabling powerful integrations with companies like Wufoo, MailChimp, and Constant Contact. Together, these posts will show you just how easy it can be to set up your entire online submission review process.
Today, we are accepting more applications for grants, business incubator and accelerator programs, and competitions than ever before. This is a great thing of course – it means more money, mentorship, and prizes for all! However, with a change in application volume comes a need to improve the application management process. Even if your particular team isn’t seeing this dramatic increase in applications, it is always worth looking at your process and looking for inefficiencies that can be fixed by better application management software.
We’ll take a look at some of the benefits of using up to date application management software, and some capabilities you should be looking for in a product.
In Part 1 we looked at some of the biases that introduce themselves when generating potential solutions to be decided on later. There are also a number of decision-making biases that rear their ugly heads when it’s time to evaluate the proposed options and decide. This post will focus on just four of these biases.
So, let’s assume we’ve addressed all of the scary biases in the first stage of the decision making process, we’ve got our potential solutions in front of us bias free (congratulations!), and now it’s time to make the decision.
Not so fast! Let’s work on getting an understanding of some of the decision-making biases that introduce themselves during the all important decision-making stage. For now, let’s dive into four big ones, and we’ll tackle some of the others in future posts.
I was brought onto the Decision.io team to focus primarily on inbound marketing. Basically, that’s going out into the digital world that is the internet, adding value where possible, helping organizations solve their problems, and in turn helping Decision.io grow into the world dominating collective decision-making platform it is destined to be. Much of my work requires reading about decision making, sharing other people’s decision-making related content, participating in online discussions about decision making, and of course writing this blog that is heavily focused on decision making and similar topics.
As you may have noticed, we’ve launched! Thank you to everyone who signed up to get early access to our beta. We are rolling out your accounts as we speak!
Whether you’re a business, foundation, non-profit, or government program, we’re the platform for you! We know that many of you collect content such as grant applications, business plans, resumes, or audition videos. We also know it can be a struggle to manage, review, and make decisions about these types of submissions.
Decision.io helps you manage the flow of your online submissions and makes collective decision-making faster, easier, and better. We use a simple review and rank system for evaluation, comment boxes for providing feedback, and a decision funnel to give you a high-level view of your decision-making process.
Our API makes it possible for you to use third party forms like Wufoo and Google Forms, and push your data to familiar tools like MailChimp, Constant Contact and Salesforce. We also make it possible for you to provide personalized feedback reports that help you improve relationships with your stakeholders.
We’re committed to being the best submission management platform and we have some amazing features in the pipeline. This is just the tip of the iceberg – stay tuned for more feature updates, tutorials and other cool posts on the Decision.io blog!
Cheers, The Decision.io Team