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The Many Facets of Crowdsourcing

By Randy Corke, VP Marketing and Business Development

As you've undoubtedly noticed, online and offline news is filled with stories of crowdsourcing these days. Just about anything that involves any type of contribution from a group of people is now lumped into the "crowdsourcing" category – even if it's a contest by Dunkin' Donuts to design the next donut which they've run for many years, its now called crowdsourcing. However, the different terms that are now used to describe crowdsourcing projects – "contests", "challenges", "experiments", "calls", "competitions", "jams", "ideation", "idea management" – do highlight a very important point: there is no one "right way" to do crowdsourcing. There are definitely best practices that should be followed no matter how the crowdsourcing project is conducted, but there are facets to crowdsourcing – different ways to implement crowdsourcing depending on what the desired outcome is, the type of crowd engaged, the culture of the sponsoring organization and more.

At Chaordix, we provide consultancy services and technology to help organizations of all types get the benefit of the "wisdom of their crowds" for a variety of purposes. We start by understanding the bottom-line goal of the organization for using crowdsourcing, and from there build a crowdsourcing plan for the organization that covers all the bases: who the crowd should be, how we will motivate them to participate and keep participating, how we will recruit them, how to best moderate the crowd, what crowdsourcing model should be used, the capabilities and branding needs for the online site, and much more. And then we implement to that plan on behalf of the client. Our goal is to make it simple for companies to succeed with crowdsourcing.

On a daily basis, we receive inquiries and ideas for new uses of crowdsourcing. We also hear the concerns and questions people have about opening the organization up to outside input. If you've been reading and thinking about crowdsourcing, you probably have many of the same concerns – how do we protect the IP of the ideas created? How do we ensure that "bad" things aren't said? How can we be sure that the best ideas will be identified?

The good news is that even while we are still early in the crowdsourcing adoption curve, the crowdsourcing practice has evolved far enough, and has been implemented enough that there are good answers for all of these concerns. While there are many facets of crowdsourcing that must be considered up front to ensure a good outcome, there is an emerging truth in crowdsourcing:

The right process and the right people lead to a good outcome:
People who participate in well-designed crowdsourcing engagements take it seriously and are there to contribute positively. It's gratifying to be able to say that participants interact appropriately almost always and they respect the ideas and IP being created (although its always prudent to put in place appropriate legal and security measures to ensure the protection.) And through a combination of crowd rank and data analysis, the ideas that surface are almost always found highly valuable to the sponsoring organization and are identified as ones they might not have found otherwise.

Quick case studies:
We power crowdsourcing programs for organizations around the world for a wide variety of purposes, each of which highlights a different use and a different approach to using crowdsourcing:

• GeniusCrowds (www.geniuscrowds.com) – this open to the public site runs short campaigns focused on finding breakthrough lifestyle product ideas. Participants can win prizes for contributions and winning idea submitters can receive downstream royalties.


• Global Voices for Maternal Health (www.globalvoices.org.uk) – in conjunction with the University of Oxford, this program brings together doctors, nurses and midwives from the 50 nations with the highest maternal mortality rates to crowdsource solutions for addressing this problem.


• Mobile Volunteering (www.mobilevolunteering.co.uk) - this is a part of Orange's corporate social responsibility initiative and invites public involvement in finding the best ways that mobile devices can facilitate "doing good on the go" by volunteer acts that can be performed in five minutes or less using the capabilities of your mobile device.

If there is one truth about crowdsourcing it's this: Crowdsourcing isn't just one thing. Whether its crowd powered innovation or problem solving, or crowd funding for new entrepreneurial endeavors, or breaking down very large jobs into micro-tasks that can be doled out to thousands to complete, crowdsourcing has many, many facets and more being added every day. And that's what makes the future of crowdsourcing so exciting.