Crowdsourcing has moved from a buzzword to a burgeoning industry with a plethora of platforms and communities that have been designed in order to provide a tailored and engaging environment for both clients and the crowd to start conversing. These communities and how they’re run and managed are often overlooked in discussions about crowdsourcing where most people still seem to be focusing on the "cheap cost" or fresh creativity that can come out of a crowdsourcing project.  

Essentially, the crowd or community is the economically productive unit and without them, no project would be a success (let alone get off the ground). Community is the social glue of any crowdsourcing project and without a focus on how they can connect with both each other and the brand’s posing challenges, there’s little chance a project will have a positive conclusion.

Image Credit: Salvatore Vuono

Getting people to interact with one another and upload solutions to a challenge sounds easy enough; but engagement doesn’t happen automatically. It takes time and work. Luckily there are a number of very well-designed communities that are readily available for you to tap into right away. One of the simplest and best ways to kick off a crowdsourcing project is to make use of the communities that already exist rather than trying to build new ones from scratch. However, if you’re striking out into the crowd alone, it’s imperative that you understand that the community rules and making sure they’re happy is the ultimate key to success.

Our experience with Idea Bounty over the last two and a half years has taught us quite a bit about our community and how to please them. Sometimes the crowd can be a daunting force but if you manage them correctly they’ll become an invaluable asset. Here are some of the key things we’ve learnt:

Be inclusive

This sounds like a no-brainer but if it’s not clear that people can do things on a site, they won’t. You need to create and build platform that makes it easy for people to access and engage with. You need to make sure that you welcome anyone into your community and make the newcomers feel at home. This will ensure that you turn casual observers into contributing members who add value to the community as well as respond to your challenge. If it’s not easy for a newcomer to start participating, then you’ve built a community that’s bound to fail - without new blood and fresh brains, a crowdsourcing project will, over time, become stale and dry; exactly what you don't want to happen. 

Set expectations & instill respect 

The crowd needs to know what is expected from them as well as what you expect them deliver. This comes down to basic respect for the community - you need to think of them as valuable partners rather than random bodies. If you clearly communicate what you want from them and what you’ll give in return, you’re well on your way to establishing a relationship where everyone trusts each other to live up to their end of the deal. On this note; it’s almost imperative that you ensure a win-win situation. No crowd is going to like or trust someone who wants something for free, so you need to be able to give something in order to get something. This goes beyond money here - social kudos is a powerful thing and you as the client are in a position to make this community feel special in ways that money cannot. 

Be reliable & fair

The key to a strong community is a deep level of trust that must flow between the people who manage the community as well as the members themselves. A person managing a community has to be seen as someone who has all the answer to questions as well as being as transparent as possible. Aim to have no secrets - secrets drive the wrong type of relationship and erode the high level of trust required to successfully run a project. Last but not least, you need to be reliable and fair - if you say something follow through on it and never, ever make the crowd feel like they are being taken advantage of. There needs to be a give and take relationship at play here – you scratch their back, they’ll scratch yours.

Interaction & engagement

Don’t ignore members of the community. Remember, they are your economically productive unit and the ones who will be generating solutions to your challenges. Interacting with the community lets them know someone is listening. For example, here at Idea Bounty, we make sure we engage with our community members in as many ways as we can - we comment on content posted by members and encourage them to climb into debates and discussion around any number of topics. Engagement can be as simple as responding to emails. This level of communication and engagement helps to build respect and shows that there is a real relationship at play. As mentioned before, crowdsourcing is a conversation and if you are not talking to them, why should anyone else talk to you?

Nurture your regulars 

One of the most valuable and important people within a community are the regulars - don't forget about them. These people spend so much time getting involved in what you do and can offer great insight and feedback on how to better the community. Getting to know the community doesn’t have to be exclusively online. You can hold live real world events and if you community is strong enough, you’ll start to see them organise real world meet ups on their own. By getting the community to engage with each other, you’re making them all equals and this makes them feel like they have a stronger vested interest in the success of the community as a whole.  

Engage with pre-existing communities

Starting a new online community might seem like reinventing the wheel compared to behemoths such as Facebook. Hooking a community site up to these Social Media sites gives users the best of both worlds. Senior Strategist at NPR, Andy Carvin, believes strongly that it’s important to engage people in their own online communities (rather than assume they will engage with theirs). NPR was one of the first news organisations to partner with YouTube as part of its YouTube Direct service; which allows them to embed a YouTube upload widget onto the NPR site and create curated content galleries. They recently launched their first experiment with it called theWonderScope.

“It never surprises me that an NPR story that got 25 comments on our site gets 250 comments on Facebook, or gets retweeted 100 times on Twitter. It’s the nature of those communities to contribute and share,” says Carvin. “That’s why tools like Facebook Connect, Open Social, etc., are so interesting - they lower the barrier of participation for people in more active communities, making it easier for them to participate in sites that may not have as much of a history with Social Media.”

Also check out:

• 6 Tips for Successful Crowdsourcing
• Crowdsourcing Creative Ideas - A Client's Perspective
• The Best Ideas Get Paid. Simple.