Crowd sourcing is becoming increasingly popular across a variety of businesses. If you have recently installed crowd sourcing software, and you are ready to launch your project, it is very important that you learn some of the best practice models associated with it. This starts by understanding what crowd sourcing actually is.
What Is Crowd Sourcing Software?
Very simply put, you, as a business, ask people from all over the world (the crowd) to come up with ideas or to complete work for you. The crowd is unlimited in size, and can operate from anywhere in the world. In order to use this to your advantage, you need to have a clearly defined project, preferably with bit sized subprojects, and people can then get to work on those. You then choose the best one, and reward the individual who has submitted it in some sort of way. What the software does is keep all this information together. It is essentially a database in which you monitor and manage all the different ideas.
What About Money?
In many cases, the reward for taking part in a crowd sourcing project are not monetary. If they are, however, there are different methods and challenges to make these payments. Using PayPal is a very popular method, as is the usage of Bitcoins, which is a form of virtual currency. There is often an issue of taxes, however, with great unclarity on who has to pay what. A bitcoin wallet does solve this issue, but people often find it difficult to redeem their bitcoins.
The Best Practice Principles of Crowd Sourcing
It is said that there are five pillars to being successful in crowd sourcing. Those are:
- You reap what you sow
You must offer clarity on what you are looking for, or you won’t be satisfied with the results you receive either.
- You must set a deadline
While you may feel that an open project will attract more attention, this isn’t actually the case. One example of crowd sourcing done properly was when Rick Warren, a famous author, asked the crowd for cover designs. With a deadline of just 72 hours, he received 5,001 individual submissions.
- Be nice
Too many people think that because the crowd is so anonymous, they aren’t really individuals anymore either. But this isn’t true. You are still dealing with people, and that means they will be hugely motivated by your feedback. In fact, even the worst work can become good if you respond to it. See yourself as a coach, encouraging the crowd to do better.
- Keep it simple
Make sure you only use one market for every project. The requirements should be concise and your brief should be short and to the point. Huge, lengthy descriptions put people off.
- Don’t feed the greed
Make sure that participants in your project are fairly compensated. If you have $1,000 to spend, break it up in 10 prizes of $100, or even five prizes of $200. That is way more enticing than a single $1,000 prize.