ICE

You can do this either on a piece of paper or on a spreadsheet to make things easy. Create five columns labeled Ideas, Impact, Confidence, Effort, and Score, respectively, as shown in the template. In the Ideas column, write down your ideas, giving each one its own line. Once all of your ideas are in the column, you can now start to evaluate them. You will be scoring ideas based on their impact, confidence, and effort. Rate it on a scale of 1 to 10, where one is low and 10 is high in its respective category. Now, evaluate the ideas’ impact, confidence, and effort.

For confidence, think about whether or not this idea will succeed at making an impact. How closely does this idea align with the impact you want? Does this idea have the right delivery to create that?

Think through what your target “impact” is. What are you trying to create with this idea? A sense of community? An opportunity to reach more people? Or maybe provide food for people in need? Once you’ve narrowed down the impact, think about whether this idea will have a positive or negative impact and how powerful it will be.

Moving on to the effort column, estimate how much effort this idea will take. How much time will have to be put into it to create the desired impact? How much of the budget will need to go towards it? How much work will have to be put into it? Keep in mind that a 1, in this case, means that it will take too much effort, and a 10 means it will take very little effort.

Once you’ve gone through all three columns and have written down a rating for each, calculate the average score for each idea on a scale of 1 to 10. The averages that are closer to 10 reveal better ideas that are worth prioritizing.