Crowdsourcing For Impact

People participate in crowdsourcing campaigns because they want to make a difference. It's important for ideas to be implemented and also for participants to know they are contributing towards a real outcome. Is the ultimate goal to launch a business or project? Or is it to help organisations collaborate or learn something new? Whatever your goal, it needs to be communicated clearly from the start, in order to attract the right people.

By confirming this early on, you can align your incentives accordingly. For example, if your intention is to help launch businesses or start-ups tackling climate change, then you’ll want to encourage entrepreneurs and environmental specialists to take part in the process. Your target audience is bombarded with countless emails, texts and calls to action every week, so you need to find a way to stand out. Those who submit ideas need to know that spending their limited time on your challenge is worth the effort. Incentives might include the chance to win a place on an incubation programme, meet an influential mentor or have access to funding or finance.

At this point, you’ll be thinking about who you want to involve in your challenge and how open it will be. This is a decision between keeping the content visible to all or selecting a few who can participate, perhaps by invitation. Many platforms (including social-media tools) will give you the option to restrict who can see content, and some may even offer an additional level of sophistication, with a hierarchy of accessibility.

Traditionally, calls for ideas ask participants to submit their proposal via email or in an online form, and decisions are made behind closed doors before the results are announced. In an online process, however, you have the opportunity to add value to the proposals of those who submit ideas, regardless of whether they are the “winning team” or not. Therefore, everyone benefits, in some way, from the process, regardless of the result. When deciding who can participate in your challenge, it’s important to remember that open challenges give you unlimited potential to grow your community and reach the “unusual” suspects. It also reduces any sign-up moderation for your community manager in comparison to a closed site.

The online format of a challenge can determine how ideas develop. One option is to have one phase: for example, there might be four weeks for submitting ideas, posting comments and voting. You can call this the conventional process; it’s a great place to start if you’re new to online challenges, as it’s relatively simple to set up and explain to participants.

Another option is to add various milestones. Some platforms will allow you to set a number of voting and comment goals in order to move each idea forward. The milestone option can act as a motivator for teams to work on their original idea and develop it fully. The great thing about this process is that everyone who submits an idea has the same experience. What’s more, you can easily identify those who are committed to their idea, because they are the ones who are likely to progress through the milestones. However, this process does take a little more planning than a conventional challenge to set up online.

A phased challenge is yet another format. It involves all participants following the same timeline at the same time – this is what distinguishes it from the milestone challenge, where participants tackle milestones in their own time (as long as they make the final deadline for the process). So, if a participant joins two weeks into the online process, they will feel as though they have missed the first phase (depending on how long each phase lasts).

It may seem like a simple decision, but take your time to think about how finalists will be selected. Will it be by a community vote, a selection jury or your team? You may even want a multi-stage selection process, where the ideas are filtered down to a final list of, say, 10–12 participants, who then pitch to a jury panel. This is a good idea if participants are competing for funding of more than €5,000. Think about how much you can involve challenge participants in the selection process – it can be a powerful gesture to allow them to help choose the finalists.

Some challenges introduce a “community choice” award, others allow a percentage of the finalists to be selected by votes or scores on the platform, while the rest are filtered by a pre-selection jury. You can also add early-voting incentives to entice participants to submit their ideas earlier. Of course, there are pros and cons to all these options; the key thing is to keep it simple so that participants understand what role they play. It’s best to refrain from using a 100% community-vote process, so that it doesn't turn into a popularity contest.

Communication is a big factor in determining the success of your crowdsourcing challenge. It would be easy to think that if the platform is set up and participants have been invited, it will all work naturally, but this is often not the case. You’ll need to plan regular communication with participants to keep them moving, motivated and interacting.

If you’re lucky enough to have a communications team or manager, this is where they can help a lot. But if you don't, you may want to cover some of the bases here. These include reaching out to networks with relevant communities who could participate in your challenge and creating media toolkits with suggested social-media updates, a description of your challenge and possibly a sample blog so that your contacts can help you spread the word. Many people forget to spread the word internally and miss out on support from their local and global teams.

Another must is planning regular communication with your community, from weekly messages to updates that coincide with phases, milestones and approaching deadlines. You can increase the impact of this by having additional check-ins with your super-user group, champions and buddies. The main point is to have regular, short and clear messages going out to participants. Save time by scheduling some of this early on and using any auto-messaging function you have on your chosen platform.

Impact means different things to different people. In most cases, you’ll be able to see the results of your challenge quite quickly, be that a list of selected finalists, the design of a final project or a collection of new collated resources. However, you’ll also want to measure how the challenge process has impacted participants more widely.

It’s important to measure the impact of a challenge against your initial challenge objectives. For example, if that was to support the launch of new social businesses, the number of social businesses supported would be your main indicator of success. If you try to measure the success of the challenge in line with your organisational objectives, this starts becoming too complex and may take up more resources than necessary.

We recommend scheduling surveys to go out to active participants as soon as the challenge is closed, three months later and then again six months later, in order to track development.