Crowdsourcing Strategy

You might not realize it but crowdsourcing is growing in popularity. Successful websites are being created to allow big jobs to be done by large groups of people. These websites below are the facilitators of the tasks. The website acts as the conduit of information for the participants.

The participants can be anyone. The only requirement is to have the ability to communicate through these websites. No heavy lifting, no driving back and forth to an office. Full time workers who want to work on the side. Part time workers who want to supplement their income with projects to fill their time. Stay at home people who need work.

Let's walk through a few of the more popular websites and put them into easy to identify categories

• Ant worker: Take a large task and divide the work to a lot of workers

Ant worker websites have large task that need to be broken down into smaller singular tasks.

I've joined it a few times and helped identify and edit the text of an album cover taken from just the photo. This type of task is hard for a computer scanner to perform. Many album cover art is designed by artists who don't always use a standard font. The wording must be read by a human and typed into the database.

Another task I worked on was old property tax receipts in New Jersey or somewhere. It was old hand-written receipts for building property tax filings that needed to be read and put into a database. They gave me the scans of the receipt; I read the details and put them into the form that was provided. They gave instructions like "Look on line 5 for the address of the building and type this address into the first line of the database labeled Address."

There are other websites which specialize in editing and writing jobs. Clickworker.com is very popular.

• Team worker: Collaborate with individual experts as a team working on a common goal or task

Team worker websites have ideals submitted by members that get voted on and the best ideal gets the specialists involved. You can be a specialist and help with the project and work in the team or you can be the one submitting the ideals or just voting on which ideal is best. The more involved you are the more potential for reward. Quirky.com rewards the originator of the design a good percent of the royalties from each sale. Whoever influenced the design can also be reward in a percentage of the royalties from the products sold. The more you influence the design the more percentage of the royalties you will receive.

Give Money websites are for funding projects that don't have a large demand. Many times it's hard to predict if you better mousetrap design will have any buyers. These websites advertise products before they exist so you can pre-book the sales. You get the crowd of people to commit to buy or even donate to the design of the product. In return they get the product first and the satisfaction of helping the product get built or into the marketplace.

• Win Prize: Try to achieve the goals of the contest and win the prize money

Win Prize sites generally have a goal to accomplish or problem to solve and whoever can complete the challenge or accomplish the goal will win the prize. The X Prize Foundation has four categories of challenges, Energy and Environment, Exploration, Education and Global Development and Life Sciences. Many of the worlds problems are listed and a prize is available for anyone who can tackle them.

• Give Money: Fund projects, pre-book sales, create a demand and funding for a project.

Sites like Kickstarter.com allow members to submit ideals and people can help the ideal become reality by sending money to fund the ideal. For example a person might want to create a book of photographs they took on a vacation. They would show a few of the pictures and ask for money. In return depending on the amount of money you gave, you would get the book once it is finished or you might get your name mentioned in the book if you gave a significant amount. This same concept will work on electronic projects as well.

This is a way of knowing how many people would be interested in your product before you start it. And also getting the money up front and now after the project is completed.

Harnessing the power of the crowd is making the world an interesting place to live. Just like teamwork, when more people get together and join forces toward a common goal or complete with each other for a prize, the results are magnified from what one individual can do.