Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing collects services, ideas or content from a massive group of people. This “crowd” is a third party outside your business walls. Crowdsource insights from customers and online communities instead of employees or shareholders.

The term “crowdsourcing” first appeared in a Wired article by Jeff Howe in 2006. The word highlighted a new way of connecting with people willing to work collaboratively on a project.

Types of crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing takes many forms, but your strategy should always depend on your desired outcome:

• Crowdfunding: With crowdfunding, large groups of people come together to fund a project. Kickstarter is a popular example of a crowdfunding platform.
• Crowdwisdom: With crowdwisdom, brands gather the input and opinions of large groups of people. Sites like InnoCentive let people share solutions to complex problems.
• Microtasking: Microtasking breaks a big project into many small tasks for a crowd to complete. Clickworker is a microtasking marketplace where brands pay people to complete small jobs like data labeling and surveys.

The benefits of crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing offers big benefits to brands that want to finish complex tasks on a budget. Asking the crowd for input also increases customer engagement and improves brand reputation. Crowdsourcing:

• Keeps customers engaged: Crowdsourcing shows your audience that you value their opinion, leading to stronger brand connections. Customers are also more likely to feel involved with campaign concepts, service ideas and products they helped to create.
• Promotes innovation and diversity: Accessing the thoughts of a broad group of diverse people allows for more out-of-the-box thinking. Crowdsourced concepts access the wisdom of groups to help companies innovate.
• Saves time and money: Hiring dozens of professionals drains budgets quickly. Bringing people together online cuts costs while radically widening your pool of input.
• Attracts ambassadors: If crowdsourcing collects enough positive enthusiasm from your audience, participants evolve into brand ambassadors. These brand ambassadors become a strong source of word-of-mouth marketing.

Tips for better crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing is an excellent way to overcome challenges and create buzz for your brand. But like any campaign, crowdsourcing takes careful planning and strategy. Make sure you:

• Stay specific: Outline exactly what you want people to do and provide clear submission guidelines. Keep requests simple to lower the barrier to entry.
• Know how to measure results: Have a way of tracking your incoming submissions. For example, LEGO Ideas considers any fan design that reaches 10,000 supporters for production.
• Give value to participants: Remember it’s not all about you. Give your customers a reason to get involved. For example, Lay’s brought back its “Do Us a Flavor” contest in 2024 with a $1 million prize. Fans sent in more than 700,000 flavor ideas, and judges picked three finalists for fans to vote on. Lay’s gets new ideas and fans get new flavors to try.

Use social listening in Sprout Social to find out what your audience is already asking for before you launch your next crowdsourcing campaign.