Allocate at least 30 minutes and ask 5 questions max: For a live Flight, make sure to allocate enough time. You can always edit the flight timing during the flight if participants indicate they’re ready to move on. We recommend asking no more than 5 questions to keep participants engaged and encourage thoughtful answers.

Facilitate the Flight: Bring in a designated facilitator to guide your team through the flight. This way, the entire intended group can take their time participating and no one expected to participate will need to worry about running the flight. The facilitator should explain the goals and questions included in the flight, and describe how the Balloon platform works before sharing the link to participate. If you’re interested in bringing in a third-party facilitator, reach out to us!

Explain the benefits: There are a few ways we describe platform benefits during live flights and facilitations. Here is a script you can use to lead your own facilitation!

Encourage collaboration: Balloon’s Collaboration Mode feature is a unique piece of the platform that allows you to view everyone’s responses and create a dialogue around them. This allows you to dive deep into ideas and feedback across functions, teams, and levels without hierarchies or group dynamics getting in the way. Being able to have multiple conversations happening at the same time is a key feature of Balloon and is part of what makes the platform so powerful.

During your flight, be sure to show everyone how to access Collaboration Mode: To enter Collaboration Mode, select the “Show other responses” toggle on the upper right of the flight. You’ll know you’ve entered Collaboration Mode when the toggle shifts to red and reads “Hide other responses.” You can switch between these modes as often as you’d like. Explain how you can add comments, ask questions, build upon other people’s balloons, and provide feedback. Pro tip: Remind people to collaborate towards the middle of Stage 1, through a facilitator or flight creator.

Keep the Flight Results public: To encourage transparency, we recommend keeping your flight results open and following-up post-flight in a meeting or email to connect the results to actions.

Ask 5 questions max: We recommend asking no more than 5 questions to keep participants engaged and encourage thoughtful answers.

Prime the pump: Introduce the Flight and your objectives with the flight in an email or, ideally, in a meeting to make the connection to your team. Make sure to communicate the importance of getting this feedback and hearing their candid insights. Let them know the timing of the stages and where/when you will be sending the shortlink so they know what to expect. If your group is unfamiliar with Balloon, also consider sending out this quick video on how the platform works.

Be creative with the stages of the Flight: There’s no hard and fast rule that Flights need to be entirely live or entirely asynchronous. If you want to start a Flight during a meeting and give people more time to continue to think and respond outside of the meeting, you can continue the rest of Stage 1 and Stage 2 asynchronously. Similarly, if you want the ideation and responses to take place before a meeting but make sure everyone votes at the same time, you can have Stage 1 happen asynchronously and do voting in Stage 2 at the beginning of a meeting and let the results guide further discussion when you’re all together.

Remind, remind, remind: Participants will receive an email from Balloon when each stage begins and when the Flight concludes. To encourage participation during Stages 1 and 2, send out reminder emails throughout each stage. Use these Flight engagement email templates we’ve drafted and tweak to fit your team’s use case and goals.

Keep the Flight Results public and share out: To encourage transparency, we recommend keeping your flight results open and following-up post-flight in a meeting or email to connect the results to actions.