In some cases, a financial reward acts as an incentive for participants. However, we’ve found that people who participate in social-impact crowdsourcing campaigns normally do so for intrinsic motives – they want to create change, they're passionate about the topic or they simply want to learn. It's very important to maintain and nurture these intrinsic motives, so we recommend avoiding a heavy focus on monetary rewards.
Having said that, in most cases we do suggest providing some sort of funding for the winning idea, but not such a high amount that the challenge turns into a competition. Money should be provided only to cover the cost of running the project and for support services, such as coaching. With this in mind, don't offer £100K when £20K will suffice.
Non-monetary incentives that are linked to the goals of an organisation work well: for example, "finalists will have the opportunity to meet social entrepreneur Muhammad Yunus". We’ve found that participants value the opportunity to increase their network and gain credibility for their idea as highly as they do financial reward.
A summary of popular incentives for participants include:
Incubation
An incubation programme provides the environment needed to help launch a business, while an acceleration programme helps start-ups to scale (grow bigger).
Support programme
A specific programme of advice, scheduled over a number of months, or access to a library of resources for the team, can be a great motivator.
Funding
Most challenges award some sort of funding. In these cases, it should be clear from the beginning how much money will be made available to the winners, along with guidance on how the funding can be used.
Recognition
Although this may not be relevant to all participants, we’ve found that for students and start-ups, in particular, recognition is useful to add to résumés or websites to build reputations. It can also be useful for internal challenges, so that teams can highlight their achievements to other members of an organisation. Recognition can take the form of "digital badges", which finalists can add to their LinkedIn profiles or company websites. These badges can hold more weight when you partner with a "global" brand: for example, you could partner with the World Bank to create an "innovation badge" to be awarded to successful finalists.
Investment brokerage service
An additional incentive could be to partner with a social investor who commits to meeting a number of finalists with the potential to provide start-up capital or grant funding. The main risk here it that many investors ask for a certain percentage share of the start-up; as a result, they may automatically favour the ideas that will yield the greatest return.
