Depending on how familiar you are with online platforms, a challenge could take anywhere between 35 and 100 hours to set up and run within a four-week period. Platforms such as Crowdicity are quick to set up and keep track of, and an experienced moderator could have your challenge ready for launch within a few hours.
See our template timeline to get an idea of some of the tasks involved.
Two weeks
If you’re running a small challenge with your team or a small group, it’ll take considerably less time to design, launch and execute than a campaign for a larger group.
You may start your challenge offline, either through Open Space, a design workshop or a World Cafe© session. This will help you come up with clear solutions, which you can then post online for participants to continue to develop, refine and vote on. At this point, you don't need to keep the challenge space open for longer than two weeks, as participants will lose interest. This means that your entire process may take less than 35 hours.
Three - Four Weeks
If your challenge is larger and involves a wider group of participants, you’ll need extra time to coordinate people, prepare advisors (if you choose to use them) and moderate the online space. Participants may be at different points in the process, so keeping the challenge open for longer will allow you to reach out to more participants and allow them to work through the process.
If you already have a large network/community to approach, you may not need too long a run-up to attract interested participants, but we recommend that you still take time to build seed ideas – you may want to keep your challenge space open longer, so that you can run offline events to gather interest and help participants develop stronger proposals. For this reason, you may want to accept submissions over three weeks, if you’ve already gathered a focused community, or four weeks, if you have access to a large network.
If you’re a small team or feel that your existing community will take a lot of pushing, you may want to start outreach a few weeks earlier. It’s often best to plan backwards, with the end date in mind. Timings will partly depend on the group’s communication channels and funding sources. See the timeline for examples.
Four - Six Weeks
This is quite a long time to be open for submissions, and means you'll end up working on your challenge for at least two months, if you include preparation time. This may be necessary if you’re working on an open challenge – in this case, you’re likely to need extra time to assess how ideas are developing and whether the quality of ideas fits your objectives, as well as address any issues.
Bear in mind that it takes at least a week for all newcomers to the platform to feel ready, as most people won’t sign up on day one, but will flow in throughout the week. Remember that the longer a challenge is open, the more content you’ll need to provide in order to keep people interested. Also, as most ideas get added near the deadline, the challenge can be at risk of looking a little “dead” until that point, so you may need to introduce mini-challenges along the way, such as the early-bird option, which adds an incentive for early idea-submitters.
The main activities that will improve the success rate of a longer challenge (they may take a little time) are:
recruiting peer mentors or buddies;
building a small network of early adopters/champions;
sourcing seed ideas to frontload the challenge;
and early-bird voting.
Starting early can present a challenge in maintaining energy from partners and participants. Begin with the more time-intensive tasks: for example, building partnerships, collecting seed ideas and developing relationships with networks that could participate.
Crowdsourcing requires a sudden burst of activity – it doesn’t work if people submit ideas all the time. This is because it relies on an intense exchange of comments and questions, which requires a regular time-investment from participants (around 30 minutes a day). Most people simply won’t be able to invest that much time on a permanent basis.
In our experience, the best solution is to run two to three challenges a year, which last approximately three to four weeks. (Universities, for example, may want to run less e.g. two due to student holidays).
