Photo courtesy of lisahumes
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 athttp://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!
- 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.
- 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.
- Lithium - create your very own “customer community.” Influence, engage, and convert to supporters into super fans.
- 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.