sparked

Ben Rigby is a Social Citizens Ambassador as well as the co-founder and CEO of Sparked.com—the world’s first crowdsourcing platform for unpaid labor (microvolunteering); the platform powers online volunteering programs for companies including Kraft Foods, SAP, Aegis Media, Teradata, and LinkedIn.

Ben Rigby can be found on Twitter @benrigby

 

You already know the story of Wikipedia: tens of thousands of people collaborate to create the most compelling, complete, and accessible encyclopedia on the planet. Working together, these anonymous strangers contribute hard labor to create something larger than the sum of the parts. And they do it not for money, but for love of the end result... (and reputation, fulfillment, and vanity).

And there are others: Flickr Commons, the Citizen Archivist, Galaxy Zoo, and many other stand-alone projects that attempt to harness the passions of enthusiasts to create something big and wonderful. Most of these projects rely on intricate software that takes one gargantuan task (e.g.: writing an encyclopedia) and breaks it up into many small bits (e.g.: writing or editing a single article). As you may already know, this model of work is called “crowdsourcing.”

Crowdsourcing is cool. You sound really smart when you say it. Good-looking people like Jeff Howe write books about it. But if you work at a nonprofit, small business, or department in a large corporation, it’s really hard to figure out how to make crowdsourcing work for you. While you have many gargantuan tasks waiting to be pegged with a rock, you haven’t got the foggiest idea how you might tap into the collective expertise of your fans and followers. You might post an occasional survey on Facebook or a question on Twitter, but that’s not exactly bringing down your Goliath.

So how do you get lots of people to work for you online?The short answer is: you pay for it.

The market for paid online labor has exploded over the last several years. Services that supply paid crowd labor include: Crowdflower, Mechanical Turk, 99Designs, Crowdspring, and many more. These services are very nifty. Crowdflower and Mechanical Turk can take your big project (e.g.: classify 1,000 products for an online store); break it up into 10,000 smaller tasks; double or triple check quality; and then deliver the completed project back to you. For money, you can hire tens of thousands of mercenary Davids to slay your Goliath.

The problem with these services is love. Or, more precisely, the lack of it.

Mercenary David doesn’t care about you or your giants. He just wants to get paid. Of course, you’ll be able to find exceptions, like a passionate designer at 99Designs who really dives into your project. But, as a rule, these crowdsourcing platforms distribute tasks to groups of workers who do it for money. That’s not exactly a fulfillment of the romantic vision that I painted in the outset where 1,000s of workers, driven by passion, sweat into the late-night to complete your project.

So, how do you get your project completed by workers who love you? You need to find and harness your super-fans.

It just so happens that people who work for passion are driving a tectonic shift in the way business gets done. The term used to describe this shift is “social business.” It’s a funny term because people formerly used it to describe a business with a social-good focus. But now, it’s being co-opted (unknowingly) by business folks to describe a business infused by social media. In short, a social business is one that crowdsources work to people (customers) who do it for love, online. See this fantastic collection of research by analyst Jeremiah Owyang from Altimeter group about the social business transformation.

Take, for example, Starbucks. People love Starbucks. They love it so much they’re willing to donate their scarce time and top creative juices to Starbucks at http://mystarbucksidea.force.com. If you have the next great idea for Frappacino flavoring, you can post it here. If you want to help Autodesk reduce their customer support costs and sell more product you can offer your skills directly to the effort (read about it here).

There are many more examples and dozens of software platforms to help businesses achieve ROI from super-fans, brand-ambassadors, enthusiasts, or any other number of terms used to describe people who work for a company because they love the brand.

Of course, the irony for the social sector is that it’s totally missing the boat. That which originated in the social sector--projects like Wikipedia that were envisioned for the greater good--have inspired business to adopt its model; they’re now making it 1,000 times more efficient. Autodesk relies on its super-fans to reduce customer support costs and they're achieving a 10x return on their investment. Autodesk’s thousands of Davids are slaying one giant cost center. That’s an amazing result.

Nonprofits are asking their Davids for money: mostly so that they can hire other Davids to slay their Goliaths. That’s 95 percent ludicrous*. If you were checking email this past holiday season, you were on the receiving end of the great year-end “ask.” Now imagine that the ask instead was to join a community like Starbucks’ or Autodesk’s - in which a pool of talented people is ready to jump when you say jump--ready to pitch in their expertise for a cause they hold dear.

In case my point isn’t exceedingly clear yet, I should state it explicitly: these super-fans, brand ambassadors, and brand-champions are volunteers**. Businesses are doing online volunteering better than nonprofits are doing online volunteering. In fact, businesses are so excited about online volunteering that it’s about to transform business as we know it. Hooray for business! Seriously, it’s an amazing transformation and adoption of the technology that I think is going to make for better businesses, smarter products, and happier customers.

But it’s a missed opportunity for many nonprofits who are still asking primarily for money. The good news is that there are many new entry points for organizations looking to harness the enthusiasm and expertise of their supporters, fans, and followers. There is a proliferation of tools and best practices.

Here’s a top five list for you to get started. Good luck and happy crowdsourcing!

1. Sparked.com - starting with an admittedly biased and self-interested listing at the top. Sparked enables nonprofits (and soon, businesses) to distribute tasks to supporters. Gather up the people who love you and use Sparked to harness their collective expertise.
2. UserVoice - ideate all day long with your supporters or customers. Rank, sort, and percolate great new ideas from the people who know your organization, products, or services best. Spigit - tap into the collective intelligence of employees, customers, and fans to tackle business objectives.
3. Lithium - create your very own “customer community.” Influence, engage, and convert to supporters into super fans.
4. ChallengePost - create a challenge and have your community collaborate to solve it.

And bonus: if you read one book, make it this one - Social Media ROI by Olivier Blanchard. Aimed at businesses (with a nod to nonprofits), it’s 100% about how to harness the smarts and passions of your crowd... while delivering a superlative experience for them at the same time.

 

* Of course, it’s 5% sane. I’ve been there with my own nonprofit and I know how tight money is and how long and painful it is to fund raise - and how important it is to the viability of the organization.

** The term “volunteer” may be too laden with meaning (perhaps even stigmatized) to be useful in the context of online crowdsourcing. If you want to get work done for free by people who love you, you’re going to have to call them something other than “volunteers.” Wikipedia calls them editors. Linux calls them contributors. Flickr calls them members. Galaxy Zoo calls them classifiers. Autodesk calls them super-fans. And the Case Foundation compelled me to write this post by calling me an “Ambassador.” But what am I really? I’m a volunteer. All of us who participate in crowdsourcing initiatives, forums, and Facebook surveys for brands are volunteers. We’re donating our time to the benefit of that organization. But if you call us “volunteers” - all of a sudden we’ve got images of altruism, fence-painting, and Norman Rockwell in our heads. For many reasons, the term doesn’t sync with our image of having fun online. And that’s the image we need to cultivate to drive ROI.

Two very different sites are helping people to volunteer in ways that are convenient and rewarding to them. Catchafire and Sparked both provide ways for individual social citizens to find volunteer opportunities online and for nonprofits to find people outside their networks who might be able to help. While the two share the same end goal, they have very different approaches - Catchafire sources concrete, meaningful projects that individuals can complete using their unique skills, while Sparked helps people use their downtime to help nonprofits with microvolunteering opportunities.

The Catchafire Way

Hoping to improve New York City’s low rate of volunteerism, Catchafire is a little like an online dating site for volunteers. Volunteers share information about their experience, skills and interests, and in return, the Catchafire team sends the volunteer a matching list of project options. The volunteer then writes a note to the nonprofit organization expressing interest in the project, and the nonprofit chooses from the interested volunteers. Volunteers can also browse projects and organizations to see what types of projects are available at any given time. The projects are about three months in length, are designed for one person, and must have a concrete deliverable like a logo design, budget design and development, or a press release.

The goal is to connect volunteers with projects that can be completed on flexible schedules and that also exercise and build the volunteer’s skills, which could be attractive to grad students and job-seekers in this economy. Catchafire also helps volunteers quantify their contribution by estimating how much the project would cost the organization. Between now and January 31, Catchafire aims to matched volunteers with more than $1 million in nonprofit projects. So far, Catchafire is only available in New York City, but be sure to check out their website.

If You’re Not Ready to Catchafire, How About a Little Spark

For a volunteering platform where physical location isn't important, see Sparked, by The Extraordinaries. Sparked is built on the idea that people want to volunteer, but they might not have a four-hour block on a Saturday. What they do have is downtime – waiting for a meeting that was pushed back 15 minutes, waiting to board a flight or waiting for their frozen pizza to cook. With Sparked, "waiters" become productive do-gooders and nonprofits get some much-needed help. After signing up, volunteers have personalized home pages that suggest current challenges that might suit their interests and skills, but they can also browse by the nonprofit, the cause or the skill needed. They can see how others have responded to the challenge and add their own answer to the thread. Sparked also allows small businesses and corporations to run their employee volunteer programs through the platform, by making it easy to track volunteer hours but still allowing employees to maintain different interests, skills, schedules and geographic locations.

Sparked asks nonprofits to post challenges that can be done entirely online, can be completed quickly and have a measurable result, and they can post five challenges at once. Some examples of volunteer tasks posted include suggestions on companies a nonprofit should approach for sponsorship, tips on how to effectively use social media for 30-minutes each day, document translation, web redesign and logo design.

It seems the requests with the most responses are ones that essentially employ Sparked as a type of "Yahoo questions" for nonprofits, rather than a volunteering site. If a friend at a nonprofit asked you a question about how to use social media for their nonprofit and you spent a few minutes making suggestions or pointing them to resources, would you consider that volunteering? Probably not. But on Sparked, it is. Is this an expanded definition of volunteering, or is it not quite what the Sparked team intended?

Nonprofits asking for help with a very specific product like translation or graphic design might receive more substantial contributions, but even then, respondents seem to be tempted to tell someone how to do something rather than doing it for them, which may be the price you pay for targeting these tasks at people with only short amounts of time to spare. For example, one nonprofit posted asking someone to design a dolphin graphic. So far, three people have responded, each sharing websites where the nonprofit can find existing dolphin graphics. It's not that these responses aren't helpful, it's just slightly different – well, less, frankly – than what was asked.

Getting Warmer

Managing volunteers to produce something of value to the organization as well as a meaningful experience for the volunteer is kind of the holy grail of nonprofit engagement. Both sites aim to work with individual volunteers’ interests and time constraints, but they are aimed at different people prepared for different levels of engagement and who have different definitions of what makes a meaningful volunteer experience. And both have some of the same types of projects listed, but as nonprofits grow accustomed to using these sites, I expect that will change. They might use Sparked for information, research and brainstorming - small tasks for lots of people with a little time – and Catchafire for more thoughtful, skilled projects, like web or logo design.

As with traditional volunteer management, the key seems to be knowing what tasks make sense for this forum and audience and crafting your request in a way that will receive the most helpful result. Both sites have put thought and effort into steering nonprofits toward posting well-defined, measurable and time-appropriate projects, and that's a great start. These platforms won’t solve a nonprofit’s volunteering woes entirely, but used thoughtfully, they could certainly help nonprofits find the right people for the right tasks by opening them up to different online communities.

Try out one or both of the sites, and let us know your experience!