Importer — for facilitators

Samvinas

• Add Importer to your flow, usually as the first tool. It deliberately has no way to add ideas on screen — everything arrives through one door, the import box.
• It starts hidden from participants — that's on purpose. It's a supply cupboard, not an activity; participants see its ideas through whichever tool you connect to it.
• Open the tool's gear menu, go to the Data tab, and tap Import items…. Paste your list — one idea per line — and import.
• The Contents list above the button shows what landed. Tap an item's text to fix a typo; the ⋯ menu deletes a stray line.
• One line becomes one idea, so tidy the list in your notes app first — strip numbering, headers, and blank padding. Importing again appends everything you paste, including lines already there; adding more later, paste just the new lines and glance at Contents.
• Want participants to see the raw list as a reference page? Flip the tool visible in its Settings tab. They get a read-only view — looking is fine, adding still goes through you.

Connect the next tool (Voting, Clustering, PPCO…) to the Importer as its source — tools added straight after it connect automatically — and the pasted ideas flow downstream like any brainstormed ones.

Paper and pen

The analogue Importer is preparation: the ideas go up before the group arrives.

You need: the source list, sticky notes or index cards, a fat marker, and quiet time before the session.

• Write each idea on its own note, big, and number them — "number 12" is how a group refers to a card it didn't write.
• Post them as a ready-made wall, or deal them into envelopes — one set per table — if groups will work separately.
• Introduce the wall with its provenance ("these came from your survey answers") and invite the group to work on the cards, not admire them.
• The failure mode: presenting the list as finished. A tidy, pre-printed wall reads as decided, and the group critiques instead of building. Handwritten, slightly rough cards signal work-in-progress.
• Harvest: as with any wall, photograph it before the next activity rearranges everything.

When & why

Reach for the Importer whenever the starting material predates the event — survey results, a prior workshop's shortlist, stakeholder interviews. It spares the group re-generating what already exists and gets them straight to the work only they can do: judging, clustering, developing.

• Be transparent about provenance; a group works harder on ideas it trusts.
• Seeded ideas are a floor, not a ceiling — pair it with a Brainstorm if you also want fresh thinking.
• What usually follows: almost anything — Voting or Clustering to work the list, or PPCO to develop a single imported proposal.