However, a perhaps less-used definition is actually the original one, coined by Alvin Toffler back in 1980, who first identified a prosumer as one who is highly interested in a particular product, service or brand, and wants to become involved with it to help fashion its future. In other words – a “proactive consumer”.

It is Alvin Toffler’s definition of “prosumer” that is highly relevant to crowdsourcing as it enables the identification of these individuals, who can be immensely valuable to any organization. Prosumers are often word-of-mouth powerhouses that can influence a large number of people and therefore promote your product, service or cause.  They are also consumers or advocates who can become actively involved in the design or production of a good or service, or simply raise awareness of a movement by helping to shape its impact regionally, or globally.

So how does this all fit into crowdsourcing?  Crowdsourcing is perhaps the most effective way to identify the prosumers, to bring them into your brand (or cause) and give them a meaningful way to engage, contribute and grow their relationship with you. Crowdsourcing can also provide a way to bring prosumers together with other prosumers and engage on innovation and co-creation initiatives. Prosumers can be hidden assets for any organization, but through crowdsourcing you can make them known to your company, and begin to build lasting, highly productive and mutually rewarding relationships.

What can prosumers do for you?

Prosumers can contribute in three major ways to your organization: through abundant feedback and input, insightful conversations in consumer groups focused around brands and ideas, and ultimately, co-creation and open innovation.  Therefore prosumers will touch three key aspects of your business: market research, brand and innovation; and successful crowdsourcing programs do just that, enable any form of contribution from the crowd through microtasks to hands on co-creation.

Prosumers are most insightful in co-creation by providing real-life feedback in testing new concepts before rolling them out to the market. Prosumers can also raise awareness or elevate a cause in their network and are motivated more by the bond with your organization than they are by awards or external incentives. We often give prosumers a special role in our crowdsourcing programs – by inviting them into private areas for hands-on innovation or acknowledging them through brand affiliated reputation and/or influence.

Our team has aspirations for some of the brands we touch every day, like RIM, Air Canada, Rogers, Shaw, and HSBC as they have so much to gain from their prosumers that are just waiting to be invited in.  We’d love to help them to build their communities or make their brands participative.

As for the rest of you, take a step – a bold step – and extend an invitation to your consumers both current and future via social channels, mobile and web-enabled engagement; capture all that they are trying very hard to contribute, and remember to acknowledge and reward them.  There is no better investment for your brand, products, services or cause – we’ll see many cases studies of ROI very soon.

Originally posted on The Daily Crowdsource here.

The great news is that, in almost all cases we meet or exceed the goals we set for participation and contribution.  Amazing you think?  It’s all in the objective, design, incentives and engagement strategy.

There are a lot of demands for people’s time and we all know we don’t have nearly enough time to do all the things we want to do.  On the other hand, if we can do something quickly and easily, and it is something that interests us, its highly likely we’ll do it.

That’s the basis of how successful crowdsourcing programs are designed.  The first part of that is ensuring that your objectives are achievable, actionable and represent something that we believe will be compelling and meaningful to the crowd.  Then we help select and recruit the target crowd that is most likely to care about the subject matter, and develop an incentive program accordingly.  (Note – here at Chaordix, we are not big fans of big prize incentives, rather, we use a combination of intrinsic and extrinsic incentives of nominal value, more to make it fun and provide some reward, but not to attract people just for the prizes. We want to attract people who care and want to participate).

The second step is to make sure the crowdsourcing experience is intuitive, so it makes it easy for people to join and being participating in minutes, without having to read long pages of instructions or take a training session.  Lastly, making the engagement compelling with good invitation messages, clear and timely communication and notification, and sharing the progress with the crowd.

The results?  Your program can drive a lot of participation.  With one recent campaign we sent one email to 10,000 + potential participants, and in the first 24 hours alone had over 2,000 people jump in and participate.  Our Chicago Sun Shine Project  program has exceeded 10,000 participants in just a few weeks, starting from scratch.

So if you are holding off on running a crowdsourcing program due to fear that no one will come.  Build it right, and they will come.

Originally posted on The Daily Crowdsource - October 12, 2011. Read the article at http://dailycrowdsource.com/2011/10/12/crowd-leaders/crowd-leader-shelley-kuipers-the-magic-of-participation/

As a bit of background, the Chicago Sun Times Charity Trust (the foundation arm of Sun-Times Media), wanted to engage their readers, and other people in the greater Chicago area to become more aware of the different not for profit organizations focused on youth education, art and civic engagement.  The purpose of the Chicago Sun Shine Project was to provide a platform for locals to nominate and influence the selection of which charities, organizations and projects they feel the foundation should support.  Participants, local non-profits and others were invited to “shine a light” on the charities and causes for consideration of support of grants that will total up to $500,000.

By Ernst Vikne http://www.flickr.com/photos/42834622@N00/4854165817/

The nomination of charities took place during the first month of the campaign. Nominated organizations were contacted and invited to submit their grant requests. During this time, organizations could also make their own submissions.

We’re currently in the voting period, which means all submissions are in and members of the public are having their voices heard in terms of which organizations they believe deserve the grant money. This voting phase runs until October 9th. Following the voting phase, the Charity Trust will assess the submissions as well as crowd votes and comments to help determine the allocation of funding. Winning submissions will be announced early November.

To-date, there have been over 150 grant submissions, and we’ve had over 3,800 comments and 8,800 votes. It’s been pretty exciting and inspiring to see how engaged these organizations have been in this process. Almost all of the organizations involved have used social media one way or another to promote their submissions. Many of the organizations have messages on their sites encouraging supporters to join in and vote.  Even if participating organization do not receive some of the grant funding, our hope is that this process has shed some light on their organization – which was a core goal of the initiative. So check out the site, and take a look at some really neat organizations doing some good in the Chicago area!

Those of you who have been following Chaordix know we worked with our partners 100% Open and Orange last fall on a crowdsourcing project called “Mobile Volunteering” in which we asked the crowd to brainstorm ways in which mobile devices could help people volunteer their time in five minutes or less, when they are on the go. There were hundreds of great ideas submitted and thousands of participants.

Orange just launched the results of that crowd enagement in a free iPhone app called Do Some Good which has 12 of the top ideas that came from the Mobile Volunteering crowd. We think it’s a great example of how crowdsourcing can help fast-forward new product/service innovation. And in this case, the application really fosters crowdsourced volunteering, by encouraging lots of people to donate small amounts of time, for example while they are waiting for their bus, or riding the train to work. In aggregate, all of those small contributions can add up to make a huge difference.

The Do Some Good app is available now from the iPhone App Store, and in the future will be on Android, Blackberry and Nokia. Definitely check out and download Do Some Good and tell your friends to join the crowd.

If you are among the many people and companies that are considering using crowdsourcing for the first time, after a bit of research you’ve probably started to realize that there are many considerations that you need to take into account. The good news is that while it may seem daunting at first, we’ve seen and worked on many, many highly successful first-time crowdsourcing projects.

But we’ve still seen too many companies get off on the wrong foot with crowdsourcing. Usually these are companies that make the assumption that crowdsourcing is as easy as setting up a site and asking a question. This leads them to make some poor decisions that affect the success of their crowd engagement.

If you are an open innovation champion (or market research or brand leader) in your organization, the goal of your first crowdsourcing initiative should absolutely be to generate a strong proof-point of how crowdsourcing can bring value to your organization. Companies who are successful with crowdsourcing are finding that it can drive incredible value. A recent study by McKinsey and Company concluded that there is high correlation between market share gain and companies that have adopted social collaboration techniques such as crowdsourcing with their internal and external networks.

So, it’s essential that your first step into crowdsourcing be designed for the highest chance for success. To help that happen, here are the top ways we see companies shoot themselves in the foot when getting started with crowdsourcing… so you can avoid them:

Focusing on cost rather than results. Rather than focus on achieving the desired outcome, people often focus on trying to do as a lowest cost pilot. Sure, in times of tight budgets, saving money certainly makes sense, but if you save money on something that doesn’t set you up to show success, doesn’t that work against you?

Assuming crowd recruitment is easy. Crowdsourcing doesn’t work without the right crowd; attracting your stakeholders (customers, employees, partners, general public) to participate is as important as anything else. Your crowd doesn’t have to be huge – many programs are highly successful with just a few hundred participants. But the world is noisy – people are asked to donate their time constantly, so even if you have an existing relationship with a potential group of participants, how you invite them in, incent them and keep them involved is very important. For your first program, it’s often better to work with someone who has experience with crowd recruitment.

Choosing the wrong first crowdsourcing topic. We’ve seen companies pick, as their very first topic, a challenge that has stymied their experts for years, or requires specific expertise that only a small number of people have. Sure, you want to hone your ability to use crowdsourcing to eventually address those demanding needs, but your initial goal should be to make it easy for lots of people to get involved. Pick a topic that almost anyone who works in your company, or is a customer, or a key stakeholder of your company can participate in, and one where the likelihood of showing value is high. These are topics such as ideas for new products or enhancements to existing products, new business models, ways to improve internal operations, or even better, something fun such as how to improve the corporate culture to make it a more enjoyable place to work. That’s something everyone will want to participate in, and add value!

Overlooking daily moderation. Crowd moderation is a critical ingredient of successful crowdsourcing. We’ve seen some companies get off to a good start, only to lose momentum because they tried to do it all themselves, often assigning the task of daily moderation to someone who has never done it before and already has full time responsibilities. What invariably happens is that essential moderation steps such as prompting discussions, answering questions and sending periodic updates to participants to keep them informed and coming back doesn’t happen, and participants come once but don’t come back again. Leaning on an experienced moderator can absolutely make the difference between gaining momentum and losing it.

You may have to do some significant lobbying for approval and budget to undertake your initial crowdsourcing program, and certainly you won’t want to negate all that hard work with a program that’s not likely to show the results you want. So when you sit down to think about that first campaign, align yourself with someone who has done it before.

For internal champions in larger organizations, we recently wrote about how to overcome resistance to crowdsourcing in enterprises , with some tips that have helped some to break through the resistance often put up by the legal departments or conservative senior management teams.

In a recent chat with a crowdsourcing-knowledgeable innovator within a large enterprise, he shared good honest dialog about the open innovation benefits he’s seen in his organization, and also the challenges he faces.   The two biggest challenges he mentioned are:  1)  getting other organizations inside the enterprise to embrace the concept of open innovation and get engaged, and 2) dealing with the resistance in the legal department in their organization.

These are common issues that we hear about frequently from innovation champions, and these issues beg the larger question:  How do you get rolling with open innovation in a large organization given the resistance?

I’m going to wager that if you have “innovation” in your title and you are in a larger enterprise, you have been contemplating just this question (and facing these challenges).  You’re not alone.

Start off with the right mindset:  Think of your initial crowdsourcing project(s) not so much as ones that will drive that “breakthrough idea” but more  to build the proof-points on which you can build.  You want to be as sure as you can that your initial crowdsourcing projects are successful, and it helps you to build that internal support you need to share the benefits of crowdsourcing enterprise-wide.  So how to you stack the deck in your favor?

Here is some guidance we often give to our clients and prospective clients with regards to their initial open innovation projects:

Start small

One of the major sources of resistance to open innovation inside of an enterprise is that it is unknown.  People don’t understand the open innovation process, and they don’t know what to expect from it.   So, to reduce that concern, start small.   For your first crowdsourcing initiative shoot for 300 – 500 participants, over a limited time period of maybe one to two months.   One of the things we’ve learned over the past five years is that you still can drive great results from a small but engaged crowd.  In fact, if done correctly the quality of the results would be difficult to surpass even with a much larger crowd.  More ideas aren’t always better.    Smaller crowds are easier to recruit, easier to motivate and easier to moderate, and will often display much higher than average participation levels.

Start simple

There are likely all sorts of potential applications for crowdsourcing and open innovation within your organization.  Some of which might involve solving complex problems that you’ve been having trouble with; problems that may be preventing business growth. So the potential payout is high.  But these types of open innovation challenges often have a lower success rate, and can require some specific expertise on the part of the crowd.   They are still worth doing, but not as your first open innovation challenge.  Rather think of challenges that have a much higher rate of success – such as challenges to enhance current products or services, improve business operations, or identify new business models, for example.  For each of these, a well-designed and executed challenge is almost guaranteed to yield valuable results, and provide the proof point you need.

Start Inside

As we’ve noted in past posts, crowds almost always behave very well in a crowdsourcing site, and respect IP and legal terms (we have yet to hear a report of a “stolen idea”).  Yet, we understand legal departments tend to worry about protection of IP and difficulties in transferring IP created to the company.   So we suggest you start “safe” by reaching out to an internal crowd.   Your company presumably has an existing relationship regarding IP ownership with your employees, and this can be reinforced with the terms of the challenge engagement itself.   While the IP relationship with external crowds is well understood at this point and the legal worry isn’t really justified, its usually much easier to get legal to bless an initial project with a “safe” internal crowd.   Plus you get the added benefits that internal crowds often participate at even higher rates  and you’ll build internal goodwill by allowing wider employee participation in something of meaning to the company.

Since you’ll be learning a lot from your first open innovation project as well, keeping it small, simple and inside means that you have to worry less about the project and can focus more on enhancing your own experience and expertise.   If you’ve followed Chaordix for a while, you know that another thing we’re fond of saying is “We make crowdsourcing simple”, and we mean what we say.    What ideas do you have for first steps with open innovation in 2011?

In line with Earth Day 2010, Humanity Calls ran a two-month tournament to encourage support of environment-focused non-profits based on their worthiness as determined by the crowd. Ebay seeded the donation pool with $50,000 from their Ebay Green Team initiative. The donation pool was split among over 45 non-profits, with the top recipient receiving almost $10,000.

Non-profits could register for free and anyone could cast a vote for a non-profit just by logging in. Additional votes were earned by making donations and inviting others to participate. The tournament ran for two months and in that relatively short time had over 39,000 votes cast and managed to attract an additional $25,000 in individual donations to augment the seed pool.

Humanity Calls is a volunteer effort of 50 people (based out of Alberta) and Veer said they encouraged volunteers to take on roles that they were passionate about and leveraged their skill sets to make the best use of their volunteer crowd.

Veer said their aim was to deliver an easy way for non-profits and NGOs to benefit from crowdsourcing without having to do it on their own. They took inspiration from other programs such as Pepsi Refresh and Chase, but with a focus on making it micro, nimble and repeatable. He stressed that different crowdfunding and crowd philanthropy sites appeal to different people, so it’s important to have a variety.

Participating non-profits were encouraged to get out their votes from their supporters using social media – and it seemed to work – Humanity Calls had almost 200,000 visits during the month of June alone.

In the “what worked well” category, Veer thought the fact that they were able to quickly get 120 non-profit organizations involved without significant outreach, that they received a very positive response from all participants, and that they successfully made it easy for individuals to make a contribution were all signs that the model works.

Moving forward, he believes the approach could be improved by providing more information about the non-profits involved, essentially a short education element about each non-profit, so people might vote for a non-profit they were not familiar with before coming to the site. Similarly, he thinks that providing tools to allow participants to compare non-profits would be helpful in driving that same result.

Looking to the future, Humanity Call’s vision is to run a number of these types of tournaments with different non-profit focus, always with a large brand as the sponsor. Veer sees sites like Indigogo really picking up, the fact that its cheaper to start companies especially on the web, and that its easier for people to fund what they are passionate about as indications that many more efforts like Humanity Calls will spring up in the future. He advises individuals wanting to learn more about crowdfunding to look at the types of projects you want to fund, and the different means of funding available to you, such as Kiva, GrameenBank and MicroPlace.

Without a doubt, pioneering projects like Humanity Calls are blazing a path for new initiatives and with each project we learn more about best practices for tapping the crowd. What are your thoughts about how crowdfunding for non-profits organizations might be improved?

Originally posted at 100% Open.

We are excited to announce that we are launching our latest project with Orange called Mobile Volunteering which brings together a healthy and expert mix of technology developers and social entrepreneurs and NGOs.

On the site we are creating everyday opportunities for social action, kick-starting a new movement. Through an app on their mobile phone, people could for example volunteer to map and tag wildlife photos, make an audio map for the blind, or complete a charity’s survey. Imagine the potential of millions of people regularly contributing in this way.

The project itself is an collaboration between Orange, Chaordix, 100%Open and Good Business which has been lots of fun so far too. See below a short video about the project.

Else do keep an eye out on the site and start sharing and building your ideas or apps.

Way back in February we were invited by Matt Thompson at Mozilla to present to the Drumbeat community about our experiences with crowdsourcing technology ideas from initial concept through to development. (For those of you who aren’t familiar with Drumbeat, it’s a Mozilla initiative to crowdsource the design and development of things that will enhance and sustain the open web.) We then posted a few lessons we thought Drumbeat could benefit from hearing.

Fast forward to last week – Shelley and I had a chance to catch up with Matt to hear how things are coming along and find out what they have learned. Matt was happy to share and much of what he has learned will be of value to anyone who is looking to crowdsource technology development.

Matt said they had a set a goal for their first few months of identifying a few projects and getting organized behind those projects. So far so good they’ve identified three areas in particular: Universal Subtitles for online video, Web Made Movies, which will showcase the power of new open video tools and HTML5, and the P2PU School of Webcraft, a totally free curriculum of training and certification for open web developers, which (as you might expect) is peer-developed, led and delivered.

They’ve also been able to attract a starter community of skilled contributors, and so far the actual output has exceeded expectations, which is very encouraging. People who see the initial work are excited by it, which according to Matt is a much better way to communicate the power of Drumbeat than trying to explain it!

And as expected, there has been lots of learning along the way;

• They’ve found their initial online collaboration platform, which was admittedly a temporary “lets get something in place quickly” effort, is not sufficient to support their initiative. It won’t allow them to scale the projects to the extent they need to, and ironically makes it hard to accept all of the offers to help they receive.

• They’ve also found that helping projects move forward and succeed has been more high-touch and labor intensive than they first anticipated. (This is something we commonly hear from companies trying to do it the first time themselves.)

• Lastly, they’ve found it’s not trivial to break a larger task down into smaller tasks and create the mini-milestones needed to shepherd the whole process along.

Overall, from what we heard from Matt, we’d say that Drumbeat has made some nice progress and like most of the companies we work with, sees more than enough value to keep plowing ahead and increasing their own crowdsourcing sophistication. (We, of course, have offered to Matt our help in giving some advice and insight on how to evolve their platform, and recruit crowds, as that’s what we live and breathe each day.)

In a post two weeks ago, we talked about how crowdsourcing for market research can avoid some of the inherent biases that can come with traditional research techniques.   There is another reason for why crowdsourcing is being increasingly applied for market research: it can result in better data.

A common question we hear is “how is the quality of information, ideas and data derived from crowdsourcing better than what you might get from traditional research?”   Here are a few answers:

More ideas: With a traditional survey, each recipient fills out the questions based on their thinking right then.  Once they have filled out the survey, they usually can’t go back to add additional thoughts that might come to them later.   In addition, since they can’t see other respondents’ replies to the survey (by design), their own thinking isn’t triggered by the thoughts of others.  How many times has a good idea come to you because of something someone else said?    Crowdsourcing provides not only a way to capture ideas both now and later, since most crowdsourcing sites live on for weeks if not months, it also enables the sharing of responses that can trigger more thoughts and ideas.

Better ideas: With traditional surveys, each respondent puts in their own ideas, and then those ideas are rolled up and analyzed, but at no point is there collaboration that enables the improvement of those ideas.   Sometimes this is desirable and intended, but if you are looking for innovation, what you really want are the best ideas, shaped and enhanced by the collective intelligence, experience and viewpoints of the community.   In some crowdsourcing models, the submitters or “owners” of the ideas can revise and enhance their ideas based on the feedback and comments from the crowd.   In addition, through ranking or voting, you get a relative rating of how the crowd feels about a particular idea relative to the other ideas submitted.   This can result in both better input, and a way to more clearly determine market preference.

Multi-media input: When was the last time you took a survey that allowed you to upload an image, document, hyperlink, or video to help communicate your idea?  This is becoming standard practice in crowdsourcing both for initial ideation, and increasingly for commenting and suggestions to those ideas.

Explicit and Implicit Data: When you think of crowdsourcing, you think of the ideas, comments and votes that generally come along with that.  Those are all forms of explicit data, and by themselves can provide superior input for market research than traditional research means as discussed above.   But with crowdsourcing, you can also measure how the crowd interacts with the data itself, which can provide valuable implied insight that traditional research would miss. Implicit data can include things like how often an idea was viewed vs. how often it was given a positive vote.   This is an important way to find ideas that might be superior ideas even though they didn’t get the most votes. (there are lots of reasons why the best idea might not get the most votes, but we’ll hold that for another post).   Analyzing comments to find the frequency of use of certain terms is another piece of implicit data that allows identification of important trends and themes.

I’ll stop here, but you get the drift.  Include your crowds in a collaborative way for market research, and you’ll likely derive better quality input.

Up next:  Identifying your best respondents