People participate in crowdsourcing campaigns because they want to make a difference, so it’s important to be clear about the outcome of your challenge. A crowdsourcing campaign will only make a difference if at least some of the results will be implemented.
Confirming your outcomes will help you make a decision about what incentives and support you’ll need to provide. For example, you may want to offer a programme to incubate business ideas.
Here are some outcomes to think about:
a) Launch a business
Online crowdsourcing challenges reduce the development and research costs for start-ups, giving entrepreneurs access to feedback from mentors, advisers, stakeholders and peers sooner than a traditional challenge. Participants can also practise how to market their idea and respond to difficult questions early on, resulting in a more refined concept and final pitch. Usually during an open-challenge process, even if the participant doesn't get selected as a finalist, they gain valuable advice to develop their ideas along the way.
b) Launch a non-profit project
Along with the above points, nonprofits benefit from crowdsourcing by accessing potential partners and supporters who are willing to offer their time, skills and resources to develop the project. This includes access to entrepreneurial advice to help make ideas more financially sustainable. You may even gain enough information from the process to produce a report of your findings to share with the community.
c) Launch an internal project
By involving people from your organisation who’d not usually have been invited to the meeting, and by connecting team members beyond their local offices, crowdsourcing challenges can amplify ideas for internal projects. As well as offering a faster and more democratic way of making decisions on internal projects, the process fosters closer relationships with colleagues and strengthens the culture of collaboration and knowledge-sharing.
d) Collaborate across organizations
Crowdsourcing challenges help speed up the process of knowledge-sharing and collaboration between different organisations. This means that connections and ideas-sharing don’t rely on a single person, but rather the wider group, therefore opening teams up to new opportunities.
