Idea Prioritization Meeting

In the idea prioritization meeting, your issue committee will discuss all the ideas from the idea collection assembly and choose 6 ideas for further development.

  • Goal: Prioritize top 6 ideas to develop

  • Pre-work: rate proposals along criteria of: need, impact, equity, feasibility

  • Invite: whole issue committee

  • Agenda

item disposition time
Goal: Which 6 proposals should we submit for vetting? Info 1 min
Review decision-making norms Info 3 min
Review group ratings Info 3 min
Discuss proposals near top where there is disagreement in ratings Discuss 30 min
Update ratings Decide 5 min
Choose top proposals Decide 5 min
Check alignment Discuss 10 min

Pre-work: Rating proposals

Your issue committee may have several hundred ideas collected from assemblies and pop-up events to consider. While this may seem like a lot of work, remember that everyone’s idea should get consideration, even if they aren’t delegates.

Facilitators might want to start by removing duplicates or possibly theming ideas into sub-categories.

Facilitators should then create online/paper spreadsheets with a row for each idea, and columns for each committee member to rate the idea based on:

  • need

  • impact

  • equity

  • feasibility

Ranking each idea based on these categories ensures that members attend to critical criteria for assessing each idea and makes it easier to assess where disagreements between members arise. Also create formulas in the spreadsheet to aggregate all the ratings into an overall ranking for each idea.

Facilitators might also want to choose a way to rank ideas more efficiently, for example by:

  • have a subset of members do a first pass ranking

  • divide & conquer

Once you have the ideas, spreadsheet and ranking task decided, send the pre-work to all the issue committee members.

Be ready to help teammates get online and get their ratings into the spreadsheet.

If you decide not to do this as pre-work, make sure to allocate a good deal of time at the meeting for ranking.

Discuss rankings

To start discussing the idea ranking, give people a minute to review the initial ranking of ideas.

You might start by quickly agreeing on which ideas that are definitely at the top of the list, and the ones that are definiately at the bottom of the list.

Then, focus discussion on the “borderline” proposals that are ranked just above or below your top 6 (or whatever your cutoff point is). These borderline proposals are the ones make it in or out of the top 6 with even a small changes in ratings.

For each borderline idea, discuss any disagreements in the ratings along the criteria of, need, impact, feasibility, equity. if the discussion has changed your mind, update your rating.

After discussing, take another look at your rankings:

  • if you have consensus on the top 6, move forward with those

  • if you’re not sure

    • keep discussing and revising ratings

    • plan research tasks to help you resolve questiosn

Plan next steps

If you weren’t able to agree on the top idea, schedule homework and another prioritization meeting to discuss further.

If you decided on 6 proposals - great! Start planning how you will develop each idea. After you prioritize 6 projects, need to develop each proposal into a 500 word description (or less). To get started:

  • Review Proposal Development Guide on how to develop a proposal

  • Plan out research tasks for each proposal:

    • what community members do you need to talk to?

    • what information do you need to search for?

  • Decide who will work on developing each proposal

Justification

After you submit proposals, we’ll try to get several types of feedback:

  • Pre-vetting — the PB Manager will review projects, primarily for feasibility, e.g., “is this something the city can do?”

  • Expert feedback — we are hoping to will have faculty grad students in public health review proposals for potential impact—this feedback is FYI

  • Community feedback — we’ll share the proposals online and ask people to rate proposals and make comments

Your issue committee should also plan solicit feedback on your proposals from:

  • the people your proposal will benefit

  • community representatives with experience in this issue

Community members will also be able to ask questions about why proposals were not selected for further development, so: 

  • be prepared to address these questions and justify your ratings.