Crowdsourcing challenges can make more of an impact when you work with an existing network or build up a community. Starting from scratch like this can be hard work, but if you don’t have access to an existing one, we recommend building one up over time.
If you do this, your first crowdsourcing campaign is likely to be a lot of work; you may find that you spend most of your time reaching out to people to join the platform, rather than helping participants develop ideas. Your second and third challenges, however, will be easier because you'll have an existing group of participants who know what is expected of them and can jump straight in with ideas, as well as templates available, an understanding of how to use your chosen platform and quick access to media channels.
Below are the benefits of working with/nurturing a community.
Critical mass
First and foremost, you’ll develop a critical mass of people motivated by your challenge theme. This means that participants will spur each other on and have access to a supportive group of people in their mission to create change.
Having impact
Participants will have access to a space where they can connect with each other and develop ideas that may not have been selected for the challenge, but which have generated enough interest for participants to keep working on them.
In other words, a thriving community allows the energy created by the challenge to keep bubbling along until the next big burst of activity.
Habit forming
Within a community, you can start to form certain rituals that will reduce the workload for the moderator in all future challenges. This means that he or she will have more time to develop initiatives to strengthen the ideas and projects being developed, rather than spending their time dealing with technical-support queries.
Having an established community with productive habits means that next time you run a challenge, it’ll be much easier to recruit seed ideas.
Trust and culture
Within a community, participants will begin to develop trust as they connect with each other and see how ideas are supported rather than “stolen”. Very quickly, it becomes obvious that the majority of members are involved in the challenge for the common good, and are likely to worry less about intellectual property issues and share more freely.
