Overview
The Answer Library is the foundation of the response process. Having a clean and organized Answer Library is your key to success within Responsive. Thus, it is very important to develop a content management strategy and organize the data in your Answer Library for success. The purpose of this article is to give you the various options to manage your content in Responsive so that you can properly organize based on your organizations workflow.
Our clients choose to organize their Answer Library data in different ways. Some may decide to only utilize one of the options below to organize their data, while others will use all three. The best place to start is to have an open conversation with your team and first decide what data should be imported into the Responsive app.
Note: For an overview of this feature, download the attachment at the end of this article.
Getting Started
As you begin to think about content organization, think Quality-over-Quantity. What does your data look like now and is it the data that you want to use for future RFx responses? We recommend that you delete any items you don’t want/need to load in to reduce the amount of “noise” and improve your search results and reduce the number of records you need to manage. The Responsive app will support Word and Excel formatted responses so you are not limited with types of answers.
Come up with your overarching content management strategy, then you will be able to decide which of the below option combinations makes the most sense.
Here are some questions to get you and your team started thinking about how your data is organized currently, how those concepts can be replicated in the Responsive app, and what should be brought into the app:
- How are you responding to projects? For example, is it by product, service offered, or are your responses different depending on the geographical location?
- How do you find answers currently? For example, are you searching a large repository by keywords, or are you utilizing a categorization or folder structure to find the right answers?
- What terminology do you use internally to talk about your content? List them out, think about if there are overlaps and what the best terms are to group the data together.
- Will specific teams need access to certain content in the library that not all teams need access to? Do you want everyone to have access to all content in the library?
- Keeping in mind that the app will already use a keyword search to help you find your data, what other elements of your content can you leverage to organize your data?
- What is the key, gold start content we want in the library? What is the content that is out of date and probably needs to be removed?
Tags
Tags are simple, general categories to help group your content together. Our best-practice recommendation is that all Q&A pairs should have at least 1 tag. Think about how you can supplement keyword searches with some type of categorization. You may be searching for the keyword "protocol" but tags can help add context and focus that search within "Security" "Compliance" etc.
Responsive Tips & Tricks:
You don’t want Tags to be so specific that no one can remember them or find them. Tags should help to group sets of data together. One way to start thinking about these general concepts to create your Tags is to consider how your projects’ sections are laid out. We often see clients use these sections to bulk update their QA pairs with those concepts. For example, if you have a section called ‘Company Information’ and there are 10 questions in that section that are in the scope of:
Company Information
- Company Address
- Phone number
- Number of Employees
- Tax ID Number
You might want to apply a tag to this data called ‘General Information’ or ‘Company Information’. Requestors are going to use all different types of Section names, so tags are your way of putting your own terminology onto this grouping of data.
Common Tag Examples
Security, Company Information, Support, Pricing, Case Study, Technology, and many more.
Learn how to create Tags here.
Custom Fields
Custom Fields are an additional option that you can use to group and track your data within your Answer Library. By definition, Custom Fields are customizable based on your company’s needs. We often see Custom Fields leveraged in tandem with Tags to pinpoint data. The available Custom Field configuration options available include:
- Text box: Short description that can have a prefix/suffix
- Dropdown: Selection from a group of values
- Radio: Selection between options in a shortlist
- Checkbox: Selection of multiple options in a list
- Date: Select a date from a calendar
- Select User: Select one or more users within Responsive
- Multi-select Dropdown: Select more than one option from a group of values
- Auto-incremental: Unique identifier
Responsive Tips & Tricks
When creating the Custom Field make sure you decide if you want to be able to filter down on it or be able to report on it. For example, Dropdowns and Checkboxes can be filtered and sorted because they are static values, whereas a Text Box cannot. Additionally, a Dropdown is a great option for organizing content that would ONLY apply to the one item in that dropdown list. Whereas, a Checkbox is a great option when the content you are organizing might be applicable to multiple items in the list.
Example of a Custom Field
A checkbox Custom Field with Product as the display name and the different products as the values; here is an example of what the Product Add-On Custom Field looks like in the Responsive app:
Another example we see commonly is geographical location or business unit with the values listed.
Learn how to create Custom Fields here.
Collections
A Collection is an additional way to segment AND restrict your data in the Answer Library. Collections can be leveraged to add a privacy setting to a specific group of data. Only the users who have access to those Collections will be able to view the content that is added to the specific Collection. A Collection is set up in your Organization Settings by Admin users so that you can determine who will have access to this Collection.
Collection Example
A 'Legal' Collection is created and the legal team is added to that Collection. Everyone who is not assigned to this Collection will not be able to view the content in that Collection. Thus, the legal team can log in to the Responsive app and see their specific data in the Legal Collection and other users who do not have access to view this Collection will not be able to see it.