Most teams treat a campaign as finished when the decisions are made and the feedback is sent. But the 30 days after a campaign closes are among the most important for your program's long-term health. That is when implementation momentum lives or dies, when your metrics get set up or forgotten, and when the lessons from this campaign either inform the next one or disappear into the noise.
This checklist is organised by week. Work through it in order. Delegate what you can. Do not skip week four.
Week 1: Close the Loop with Participants
Send the outcome communication to all participants, including people who did not submit. (Use the template from the Communication Templates guide.)
Post a brief public summary in your most visible internal channel: what we heard, what we are moving forward with, what we decided not to move forward with, and why.
Confirm that every contributor has received a response, even if only a short one. No one should finish a campaign wondering whether their submission was even read.
Archive the campaign properly: store all submissions, scores, and decision notes somewhere accessible, not just in someone's email or desktop folder. You will need this when the topic comes up again in six months.
Week 2: Follow Up on Implementation
For every idea that was selected, confirm that the following are documented and agreed: who owns the implementation, what the next concrete step is, and what the deadline for that step is. If any of these are missing, get them in place this week before momentum fades.
Set a calendar reminder for a 30-day check-in with each idea owner. Not a long meeting. A five-minute check: is this still on track, has anything changed, does anything need unblocking?
Flag any ideas that are stalling. An idea that is three weeks old with no movement is not in progress. It has stalled. The sooner you surface it, the sooner you can address it or adjust expectations.
Week 3: Capture What You Learned
Before the details fade, document the answers to these questions while they are still fresh:
What worked well in this campaign that you want to repeat next time? (Specific things: the channel you used to share the mid-campaign update, how the challenge was framed, the speed of the triage process.)
What did not work that you want to fix? (Specific things: the day you launched and its effect on participation, the evaluation criteria that were ambiguous, the feedback process that took too long.)
What surprised you? (An unexpected source of good ideas, a theme you did not anticipate, a constraint that turned out not to matter.)
What would you tell someone running their first campaign? (This question often produces the most useful insight.)
Store these notes with the campaign archive. They are the starting point for your next campaign brief.
Week 4: Set Up Your Metrics
This is the week most teams skip. Do not skip it.
Record the baselines for this campaign so you can compare them against future ones. The metrics worth tracking are: total submissions, participation rate (submissions divided by invitations), implementation rate (ideas acted on divided by total submissions), average time from submission to decision, and employee confidence score if you measured it.
Set a 90-day reminder to follow up on implemented ideas and estimate any value generated. Not a formal audit. A quick conversation with the person who owns the implementation: what has changed, what can we quantify, even roughly?
If this is your first campaign, these baseline numbers become your benchmark. If you have run campaigns before, compare them to the previous cycle and note what improved and what did not.
Before the Next Campaign
Review your learnings document before writing the next challenge brief. Not after you have already written it.
Share one thing that came out of this campaign publicly, in a format that reaches people who participated. An update about an idea that was implemented, even a small one, is the best possible advertisement for your next campaign.
Brief your evaluation team on what to do differently next time, before they forget what bothered them this time.
Related Guides
- The Communication Template Pack: 4 Emails Every Campaign Needs
- How to Give Feedback That Builds Trust (Even When the Answer Is No)
- The One-Page Innovation Report for Leadership
→ See our full comparison of the 10 best idea management tools
