• “...crowds can have astonishing collective intelligence that far supersedes the cognitive capacity of individuals.”

    - Neil de Grasse Tyson

  • CROWDSOURCING FOR IMPACT

    Introduction

    What is crowdsourcing?

    The term “crowdsourcing” describes the outsourcing of work to a group of people, typically by appealing to passionate members of the public on the internet. It often takes the form of a challenge or competition, the idea being that more heads are better than one.

     

    People like to participate in causes they care about, and crowdsourcing offers them the opportunity to do so by contributing ideas, content or services to a specific project or enterprise. Thanks to the creativity, insight and knowledge of these people, crowdsourcing can be a highly effective way to identify talent, build teams, innovate and, ultimately, have impact.

    When to crowdsource

    Crowdsourcing works if you can break your project down into “microtasks”, if you have a funding target you need supporters to meet and if you’d like to see ideas sparked by unlikely allies. Thankfully, the rise of social technology has made it easier than ever to gather interested parties, peers and experts to work together in this way on local and global causes.

     

    It’s an innovative model that encourages creative collaboration in open-source formats. So, by creating a platform to enable people to connect and join teams, you can build and grow a committed community that can work towards solving a particular problem.

    Crowdsourcing challenges

    Successful crowdsourcing depends upon the motivation of participants to support issues they care about, so you don’t need to pay them and can expect them to collaborate willingly and effectively.

     

    This makes it possible to run impact-focused crowdsourcing challenges in a way that’s different from commercial challenges. In other words, the financial incentives are not the main focus, or even essential, and the winning ideas will normally be implemented by the participants themselves, rather than the organisation running the challenge.

    Success stories

    Here’s a handful of successful, socially focused crowdsourcing communities, which mainly use a competition model:

     

    Climate Colab – a platform, supported by MIT, bringing together people who are interested in tackling climate challenges using the collaborative values of Wikipedia;

    OpenIDEO – an open innovation platform run by design agency IDEO, which collaborates with various organisations to host social challenges;

    Innocentive – this community works on a reward basis, seeking technical solutions to challenges set by fee-paying companies and organisations.

    This site

    This website contains full and summary guidelines to help NGOs and nonprofits set up and run successful crowdsourcing challenges, as well as some quick links to get you straight to the right information.

     

    It focuses on practical advice to ensure lasting social and environmental impact through crowdsourcing, rather than simply marketing an organisation or facilitating a brainstorm. See here for details on how to use this site.