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Aha! Ideas | Customize your ideas portal

An ideas portal is a central place for people to give feedback and submit requests. Your portal is a reflection of your company — so it should match the look and feel of your brand for a cohesive customer experience. There are a variety of custom-branding options available. So let's upload your logo, customize the theme colors, and adjust your portal's email templates to match your style.

We are going to focus on settings that you can adjust yourself. But if you are ready for some advanced customization (and know a little CSS or HTML), that is an option too.

Click any of the following links to skip ahead:

Ideas portal settings

After you create your ideas portal, you will see its settings options. You will need to be an administrator with customizations permissions to configure settings. (Navigate to Settings ⚙️ Account Ideas portals or Ideas Overview at any time.)

  • From your account settings, click the name of the ideas portal you wish to edit.

  • From Ideas Overview, click the pencil icon by the name of the ideas portal you wish to edit.

From there, head to the Branding tab.

Branding

Ideas portal Branding settings affect the styling of your ideas portal. Use these to customize your portal, add your logo, and use custom colors and formatting to drive a consistent experience for your users.

Color and logos

  • Theme color: This color setting affects links and buttons in your ideas portal. Click the color icon to select a color or enter your own custom color using a hex code. You can also revert to the default Aha! Ideas color if you need to.

  • Logo: Upload your company, product, or portal logo here. It will be visible on the portal and in all email notifications to your portal users. The ideal logo would be 480px by 300px, with a preferred aspect ratio of 1.6:1. Click Remove logo to remove your logo.

  • Favicon: Upload a favicon here. It must be .png, .gif, or .ico, and 16x16 pixels. Click Remove favicon to remove your favicon.

Advanced

Custom domain/CNAME

  • Custom domain / CNAME: By default, your portal URL is in the format <yourname>.ideas.aha.io (for example, our ideas portal is big.ideas.aha.io). If you are an Ideas Advanced user, you can add a custom domain for your portal to create a unified brand experience for your portal users. To do so, check this box, enter a Domain, and select whether you or Aha! Ideas would like to manage the SSL Certificate. Click Save to save your changes. For more information, read about configuring your portal with a CNAME.

Display

  • Display: Choose your display style. Standard portals cannot be embedded and include the default header and footer, while Embedded portals allow you to load an iframe and remove the default header and footer.

    Browsers are increasingly blocking cookies for iframe content that comes from a different domain. Cookies are essential for portal authentication, so users will not be able to log in if cookies are blocked. To solve this, we recommend using a CNAME for embedded portals so that they match the domain of the hosting page. Make sure the iframe code data-portal-url refers to the portal CNAME.

Custom code

Through advanced portal branding, you can fully customize the HTML of the header and footer as well as add your own custom CSS and JavaScript to the portal. This allows you to create a header that follows the same theme of your corporate website. It is how we customized our own ideas portal.

We won't focus on these settings in this introductory article, but if you are curious you can read more about advanced portal branding settings here.

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Emails

Next, head to the Emails tab. Your ideas portal will send out emails as you and your ideas portal users create, comment on, and interact with the ideas in your portal. From the Emails portal settings, you can customize the look and feel of the emails your portal sends.

Overview

  • Email communication: This setting enables or disables all email communication from your portal — except for password reset emails.

  • Email accent color: Customize your ideas portal emails with an accent color. The color you select here will appear twice in the emails: as the border of any buttons in the email, and as the background border to the email body. The background border color will be 10% the opacity of your selected accent color. Click Send me a test on any email template to see how your accent color will appear.

  • Company name: Any idea-related emails from your portal will have this name in the From field.

  • Reply-to email: Emails sent from this portal will display this address.

  • Email subscription default: By default, ideas portal users are subscribed to idea notifications. You can change this default here. You can also use the Portal users tab settings to unsubscribe portal users (single users or all users) from portal notifications. Note: Individual ideas portal users can always opt back in to idea notifications.

Templates

Your email portal uses five different email templates to generate email notifications. From these settings, you can adjust each template individually and enable or disable the standard header for all templates.

The five email templates are:

  • Invitation: Invites a user to join your portal. The Greeting field here is unique to the email templates; use it for the header text above the email's body (e.g. "Welcome to Fredwin Cycling Ideas, Bryan!"). Note: If you have a submit-only portal or if you have enabled single sign-on (SSO) for your portal, your users will not receive invitation emails and therefore you will not see the Invitation template listed here.

  • Thank you: Thanks a user for submitting an idea to your portal.

  • Status changed: Alerts the user to a status change to an idea they are subscribed to.

  • Admin response: Alerts the user that an official admin response has been left on an idea they are subscribed to.

  • New comment: Alerts the user that a new comment has been left on an idea they are subscribed to.

You can adjust the Subject or Body of each template to match your preferred terminology and copy.

  • Both Subject and Body support HTML.

  • Body supports in-line CSS.

  • External CSS is not supported.

  • The Greeting of an Invitation email is a text-only field, so it does not support HTML or CSS.

You can also use several variables to include dynamic information in your email:

  • Invitation:

    Variable

    Meaning

    $PORTAL_TITLE

    The Portal title of your idea portal, found on the Settings tab of your portal settings (e.g. Fredwin Cycling Ideas)

    $PORTAL_USER_FIRST_NAME

    The invited user's first name

    $PORTAL_USER_LAST_NAME

    The invited user's last name


  • Thank you:

    Variable

    Meaning

    $IDEA_REF

    The idea's record reference number (e.g. DEMO-I-38)

    $IDEA_NAME

    The idea's Summary

    $IDEA_DESCRIPTION

    The idea's Description


  • Status changed:

    Variable

    Meaning

    $IDEA_REF

    The idea's record reference number (e.g. DEMO-I-38)

    $IDEA_NAME

    The idea's Summary

    $STATUS

    The idea's current Status

    $IDEA_DESCRIPTION

    The idea's Description


  • Admin response:

    Variable

    Meaning

    $IDEA_REF

    The idea's record reference number (e.g. DEMO-I-38)

    $IDEA_NAME

    The idea's Summary

    $ADMIN_RESPONSE_DESCRIPTION

    The text of the Admin response


  • New comment:

    Variable

    Meaning

    $IDEA_REF

    The idea's record reference number (e.g. DEMO-I-38)

    $IDEA_NAME

    The idea's Summary

    $COMMENTER_NAME

    The name of the user who commented on the idea


Any changes you make to a template will be saved automatically.

  • Click Insert default template to revert your changes back to the original template.

  • Click Send me a test to see a test email.

Below the templates, you can adjust one final email setting:

Email header: Choose to show or hide the default header on emails from your portal, which says, "Reply to this message and your response will be added to the idea."

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Getting started

Your first portal now matches your company brand. Next, let's populate it with data!

  1. Getting started with Aha! Ideas

  2. You are here

  3. Import data into Aha! Ideas

  4. Invite users to your account and portal

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