[Crowd Leader: Shelley Kuipers] The Magic of Participation

One of the most common worries that new clients have is that they’ll build it, but no one will come (apologies to Field of Dreams).  That is, they will launch a crowdsourcing program, but no one will be inspired or motivated to take the time to participate and contribute.

The great news is that, in almost all cases the goals set for participation and contribution are met or exceeded.  Amazing you think?  It’s all in the objective, design, incentives and engagement strategy.

There are a lot of demands for people’s time and we all know we don’t have nearly enough time to do all the things we want to do.  On the other hand, if we can do something quickly and easily, and it is something that interests us, it’s highly likely we’ll do it.

That’s the basis of how successful crowdsourcing programs are designed.  The first part of that is ensuring that your objectives are achievable, actionable and represent something that we believe will be compelling and meaningful to the crowd.  Then we help select and recruit the target crowd that is most likely to care about the subject matter, and develop an incentive program accordingly.  Rather than using prize incentives, I suggest using a combination of intrinsic and extrinsic incentives of nominal value. This makes it fun and provides some reward for the crowd workers, but doesn’t attract people just for the prizes. As clients, we want to attract workers who care and want to participate.

The second step is to make sure the crowdsourcing experience is intuitive, so it makes it easy for people to join and participate in minutes without having to read long pages of instructions or take a training session.  Lastly, make the engagement compelling with good invitation messages, clear and timely communication, and share the progress with the crowd.

The results?  Your program can drive a lot of participation.  With a recent campaign emailed to 10,000 + potential participants, over 2,000 people jumped in and participated within the first 24 hours.

So if you are holding off on running a crowdsourcing program due to fear that no one will come, build it right and they will come.