For customer companies, this is an opportunity to attract “fresh blood”, because many people are involved in the task. Volunteers, acting as performers, get a chance to realize their idea, replenish their portfolio and increase their work experience.
Crowdsourcing has been used for several years by various companies in the West to solve production problems, involving a wide range of volunteers.
Communication and activities of performers are carried out thanks to information technology, often free of charge. For customer companies, this is an opportunity to attract “fresh blood”, because many people are involved in the task. Volunteers, acting as performers, get a chance to realize their idea, replenish their portfolio and increase their work experience.
As a result, only the chosen final product matters, but the work experience, education and qualifications of the performers are not so important. All rights to the resulting product belong to the customer company, which has the right, at its discretion, to sell this product at a favorable price.
Despite the fact that crowdsourcing is only a kind of outsourcing, there are some characteristic differences here: legal contracts between performers and the customer, performing work free of charge or at a low price, in the presence of a large project, splitting it into microtasks, which are then formed into separate projects.
Competitive platforms are one type of crowdsourcing platform. Here the customer creates a competition by placing a specific task. The performers send their options for solving the task, while commenting and evaluating each other's work. Thus, one or more the best works. The winning work brings its creator a monetary reward.
A striking example of such a platform in the West is the site 99designs
Today it is the most popular crowdsourcing platform in the field of design, created more than five years ago. Companies place their orders here, and qualified specialists offer them hundreds and thousands of design solutions.
Before the competition is published, the customer pays all further expenses - commissions for depositing and withdrawing funds, as well as the award that the designer will receive if his work is selected. The awarded designer can withdraw money from the website via a Western Union transfer or via PayPal, Moneybookers or AlertPay.
In Russia, a similar resource is the GoDesigner website, which has a number of features.
At the beginning, the customer places a pitch (competition), forming a brief. Numerous visual cues help him with this. If the customer does not want to write a brief on his own, he can leave an application on the site - after a while, the site representatives contact the customer, discuss his competition and together create a brief, which is then published on the site.
The last thing that precedes the publication is the payment to the site of the reward for the winner of the pitch. Now designers, regardless of where they live, offer their own solutions - usually the first works appear within a few hours after publication. The award is guaranteed to go to the designer whose work will be selected by the customer as the winner.
He can withdraw money on his own bank card or transfer them to a WMR account. If the customer does not like any of the proposed works, the money paid is returned to him.
Data sharing is another form of crowdsourcing. In this case, we mean the open provision of data for collective viewing by persons participating in the project.
The customer is a company that invites volunteers to take part in the creation of a product that they can then use.
Startup Foursquare
A striking Western example is the startup Foursquare, built on the idea of marking on maps interesting places by adding comments, your own ratings and photos.
Users using the service can find out what interesting places are nearby or in the selected region, as well as add new ones using mobile devices and geolocation features. As a reward, users collect badges that give them certain advantages in working on the project.
An interesting Russian example is Yandex.Traffic.
This service allows users to use a special map to view the situation on the roads in real time or in the form of average traffic congestion statistics depending on the day of the week and time of day.
For the formation of maps, data from automatic tracks are mainly used, which are transmitted from users mobile version Yandex.Maps, as well as thanks to volunteers who report traffic jams on a special free number phone.
Bases of answers to user questions are a separate type of crowdsourcing sites. It works like this: a user asks a question, other users answer it, while ranking the answers of others. The most popular answers are pushed to the top, and the user who asked the question finally chooses the best answer.
Question and answer service Yahoo!Answers
The Yahoo! Answers question and answer service, launched back in 2005, works on this principle.
Thanks to the service, any user can create a question, and all volunteers from the community who have several points for previous activity can try to answer it. If at least one of the answers helped solve the problem, the user who asked the question can mark it as the best and assign it a score that increases the user's authority.
Such a system allows you to reduce the amount of spam in questions and answers, as well as push users to be active. All questions are eventually divided into categories for easy information retrieval.
In Runet, the analogue is the service [email protected], which is one of the products of Mail.ru.
Here you can also ask any question to registered users who will offer their answers. Since the service is indirectly connected to their own social network Mail.ru, the authors also used a complex reward system that allows you to earn points, improve user statuses, etc. Thus, the authority of the user is formed. All questions are also organized into categories.
Content ranking is another type of crowdsourcing platform. Users on such sites independently form content, and also assign it a rating by voting. Best Content goes to the top. Volunteers are involved.
Digg News Site
Portal users create content, discuss it and rate it. The most popular articles and publications get to the top. There is no moderation here, and users receive part of the income from advertising on the site: the more popular the news or the more friends the user brings to the site, the greater his income.
Periodically, online conferences are organized here with famous media figures, politicians, stars. Media partners2 are the largest Russian media. Many aspiring journalists use this portal to hone their pen and write articles to add to their portfolios.
Service markets are another type of crowdsourcing, more familiar to Runet users under the name “freelance exchange”. The site gathers customers and freelancers. All projects created by customers are grouped into categories of specializations: design, copywriting, IT, and others.
The customer specifies the price, conditions and publishes the job. Freelancers offer their services. The customer selects one of the applicants who will perform the task.
Some sites have the ability to secure such transactions, i.e. the freelancer is guaranteed to receive payment for the work performed, but most often the communication between the freelancer and the customer goes beyond the site, as well as the issue of payment for the service.
eLance Portal
Freelancers create portfolios and offer their services here, while customers look for individual performers or entire teams, as well as publish their projects. eLance takes care of all the payroll transactions, ensuring freelancers are rewarded for their work. There are a huge number of various tools, simplifying the interaction and work between performers and customers.
The site is open both for free use (the main functions are available, and there are some restrictions, for example, the number of applications from freelancers to participate in the project), and for those wishing to purchase paid accounts.
In Russia, most freelancers work through the Free-lance.ru portal.
If initially it was a common platform for selling services, then over time Free-lance.ru added new features for its users. Today, you can find remote work through the site in almost any specialty, there are all the tools for creating a full-fledged professional portfolio, as well as the ability to put up work to order.
Many customers not only post work projects here, but also post vacancies for those performers who are looking for work in the office.
To protect freelancers from unscrupulous customers in October 2012, all work is controlled by a special service: when creating a project, the customer publishes the price of the work and pays it to the site, which takes 10% of this amount as a commission and transfers it to the contractor as soon as the project is completed.
If the contractor is still not selected, the amount without commission is returned back to the account of the employer-customer. At the same time, user contacts are open only to those who own a paid account on the site.
Crowdfunding is a separate type of crowdsourcing, where volunteers are involved in solving the problem, who are ready to finance the project in order to realize the final result.
The project is published on the site from all over necessary information(goal of the project, tasks, required amount and deadline for its collection). To attract the attention of volunteers, customers come up with various awards and symbolic gifts.
If the project collects the required amount of money, then the customer can only withdraw them from the account, thank the sponsors and implement the project. Depending on the site, it is sometimes possible to withdraw the collected funds, even if the project has not collected the designated amount.
Indiegogo platform
One of the most popular platforms of this format is Indiegogo.
Its main advantages compared to the equally popular Kickstarter: anyone can create a project or become its sponsor, regardless of their country of residence; in the end, you can withdraw all the collected funds, even if the final amount has not been collected; projects are not subject to strict moderation before publication.
Indiegogo allows you to create projects from the fields of music, cinema and charity, as well as raise money to launch a startup. The site commission for withdrawing funds is 4-9%.
In Russia, the most universal platform for crowdfunding is the project "From the World by a Thread".
Each project here is verified for authenticity, and the funds received for its implementation are monitored in order to identify unscrupulous customers in this way. The platform is designed for projects in the fields of education, business and creativity.
All payment is made through a third-party payment system. The project charges a fee of 3.9% for each contribution and deducts about 0.01% from the final fee. The customer can withdraw funds only if his project has collected the required amount - otherwise the money is returned to the sponsors.
The Russian project of Sberbank, based on the idea of crowdsourcing, deserves special attention.
The platform collects the initiatives of citizens and customers to improve own work bank, as well as for the implementation of some of its projects. Within the framework of the platform, there are several projects where everyone can publish their proposal free of charge, and other participants can vote how relevant it is.
The customer is Sberbank itself. The site has been operating since August 2012, and the creators declare grandiose plans and prospects for the project. Time will tell how successful and popular this project will be.
In mid-October, Sberbank announced that it intended to use a technology called "crowdsourcing" for management. Almost a hundred thousand people joined the crowdsourcing project to solve the problems of Sberbank, and the head of the bank, German Gref, said that crowdsourcing will change management methods in the 21st century. So what is meant by this word?
The British government, in establishing a prize in 1714 for finding an accurate method of determining longitude at sea, was well ahead of its time. Instead of paying for the relevant research to any one scientist, London offered to participate in solving the puzzle to everyone who was capable of it. The method used by the British authorities, 300 years later, was called crowdsourcing, that is, the generation of ideas by the "people".
The term "crowdsourcing", which refers to the organization of the work of a group of people on a task for the sake of achieving common benefits, is formed from English words"crowd" and "outsourcing" - another term that refers to the transfer of part of the organization's business processes to be serviced by another company. The word "crowdsourcing" is believed to have been first used in 2006 by journalist Jeff Howey in his article The Rise of Crowdsourcing for Wired magazine.
The idea of "crowdsourcing", to put it mildly, is not new, but only the Internet has made this method cheap and widely available in dozens of areas of human knowledge. Howey argued that the development of technology has provided access to information to a huge number of users. The latter circumstance, in turn, narrowed the gap between professionals and amateurs in various fields of knowledge. As a result, organizations have been able to use the talents of the "network crowd" for their own purposes, attracting millions of people to work on a variety of tasks.
Popularization of the idea that underlies "crowdsourcing" began even before the invention of the term itself. In 2004, journalist James Schuroviesky published The Wisdom of the Crowd, stating that under the right conditions, finding a solution to a problem based on the combined knowledge of many people can be more effective methodology than using the knowledge and experience of a few of them.
Szuroviesky argued that a crowd can be smart if a number of conditions are met: it must be diverse (consisting of people independent of each other), decentralized and able to express their opinion in a single verdict. But if Schuroviesky was the Marx of crowdsourcing, then Howie can be compared to Lenin. In an article in Wired magazine, Howie argued that groups of amateurs working on a problem can often come up with top scores than professionals. Experts, even the smartest ones, will always be more limited than thousands of enthusiasts. And where is the guarantee that professionals in any field are not burdened with the same prejudices as amateurs.
The results of the brainstorming of the "network crowd" can be, for example, design solutions for t-shirts, ways to cut California's budget, slogan for a new brand of beer, solution to a difficult mathematical problem. In short, almost anything, with the exception of a number of practical areas that require the application of certain skills. You won't let the crowd do your heart surgery!
The basis of all projects using crowdsourcing are talented people who are willing to sacrifice their time. Usually, enthusiasts who are engaged in such projects seek not so much to earn money as to obtain moral satisfaction from their work. Perhaps that is why the largest examples of crowdsourcing so far have been non-commercial projects.
The creation of Wikipedia is one of the most striking, but by no means the only examples of the super-successful use of crowdsourcing (by the way, Wikipedia is also engaged in "crowdfunding", gathering around itself not only voluntary editors, but also patrons). The Library of Congress, for example, once asked users of the Flickr photo service to identify people in photographs that the library staff could not identify on their own. The problem was solved in a matter of days.
Since then, crowdsourcing has been repeatedly used in non-commercial projects: Internet users "sorted" galaxies, searched for war criminals, sorted through thousands of pages of documents, looking for important facts in them. In 2007, activists in Tunisia, using crowdsourcing, found out that the president of their country (now, by the way, the former) is secretly traveling the world.
Increasingly, journalists are turning to their own readers for help in order to improve the quality of information. Crowdsourcing actually requires the organization and its people to recognize that they no longer have a monopoly on wisdom (by the way, such flirtations of Wired magazine with the audience have failed).
Global corporations, as well as small enterprises, also did not stand aside, rushing to seek wisdom in the crowd. This is understandable, because asking for help from network users is much cheaper than hiring expensive consultants or conducting marketing research and introduce innovations. In addition, companies using crowdsourcing can rightfully claim that they listen to the wishes of customers in their work.
The business was forced to pay attention to crowdsourcing also because the phenomenon unexpectedly endangered those organizations whose work the crowd can do much faster and cheaper. Thus, software developed by users themselves has endangered the products of IT companies. Getty Images, the world's largest photo bank, was forced to buy out iStockphoto, a service that allowed non-professional photographers to earn money, using crowdsourcing as the basis of the business model.
With the rise in popularity traditional look of crowdsourcing, its shortcomings became apparent - for example, useless "noise" of ideas generated by users, insufficient motivation of volunteers, as well as a decrease in the quality final product. Even Jeff Howey, having revised his article into a full-fledged book by 2008, was more skeptical about the description of the crowdsourcing phenomenon in it, quoting science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon, who said that "90 percent of all this is nonsense."
And yet, despite all the limitations, crowdsourcing is finding new applications in a number of industries. And the "noise" generated by users participating in crowdsourcing projects can be dealt with by properly structuring the task and organizing its execution.
To get rid of the shortcomings, new technologies and generations of crowdsourcing are emerging. An example is the smart crowdsourcing technology created by Russian company Witology and built on the possibility of combining (synergy) the intellectual levels of participants. It was this concept that Sberbank put into the basis of its own crowdsourcing project.
The task of intelligent crowdsourcing is to find a set best ideas(and people), while conventional crowdsourcing aims to isolate one idea from many. This can be done, in particular, through the use of a rating system for participants in such projects, as well as special methods that allow ideas to go through a series of evolutionary stages of modification and selection (due to the evaluation of the idea by its supporters, opponents, competing groups of participants and experts). New method work with users will increase the efficiency of the work of communities and at the same time avoid sliding into the hubbub of the bazaar, so as not to miss a valuable idea, littered with heaps of information slag.
The phenomenon of the wise crowd opened up opportunities for companies that were too tempting to be easily dismissed. It should not be forgotten that crowdsourcing as a concept is still in its infancy, so a firm that is able to effectively use its power at the moment will no doubt be in a better position in the future.
The first such companies have already appeared.
Crowdsourcing (English crowdsourcing, crowd - "crowd" and sourcing - "use of resources") - involvement in the solution of certain problems of innovative production activities of a wide range of people to use them creativity, knowledge and experience by the type of subcontract work on a voluntary basis with the use of infocommunication technologies.
This definition is provided by Wikipedia.
We recently wrote about such a concept as . Today we will take a closer look at crowdsourcing, which has certain similarities with crowdfunding, but the basic meaning of these concepts is somewhat different.
If crowdfunding is a combination of financial efforts different people, then crowdsourcing is the combination of any other resources that are needed to achieve the goal.
How did crowdsourcing come about?
The author of the term "crowdsourcing" is Jeff Howe, who coined it in 2006. Then he, together with the publisher Mark Robinson, published an article in which he described the principle of crowdsourcing and gave examples. In this article, crowdsourcing was compared to outsourcing to a greater extent, and emphasis was placed on their differences: outsourcing is based on the performance of certain tasks by specialists for a monetary reward, and crowdsourcing involves the performance of work mainly by amateurs and without any monetary payment (or purely symbolic).
Crowdsourcing was first used by I Stock Photo, which has become one of the most successful photo banks in history. If other photo banks provided users with photos for 100-150 dollars per download, then on I Stock Photo you could download a photo for only 1 dollar, and the choice of photos was much wider. The question arises: “What does crowdsourcing have to do with it?” The fact is that all these photos were uploaded to the site by ordinary users on a purely voluntary basis.
Many more articles about crowdsourcing followed, one of the most famous being an article in the Sloan Management Review in 2011. Its authors are two professors (teaching in Japan and Germany) who have deeply researched how the use of crowdsourcing can positively influence the work of large organizations. They presented their findings in the form of a concise description of the activities of two companies that have significantly increased their efficiency with the help of crowdsourcing.
Crowdsourcing mechanism
The principle of crowdsourcing itself is very simple: a group of interested parties is given a specific task (most often this is done via the Internet), then those who complete this task offer their options for its implementation to the customer, who, in turn, considers them, selects the most optimal ones and then implements them in their activities.
Benefits of Crowdsourcing
So, by using crowdsourcing, you give yourself the opportunity to:
1) involve a lot of people from all over the world in your project. The number of employees of any company is always limited, and with the help of crowdsourcing, you can attract a huge number of talented people around the world to perform the desired task;
2) monitor the progress of the task. Crowdsourcing allows you to optimally distribute the load and, if necessary, resort to the use of auxiliary resources;
3) find and recruit rare outstanding specialists. It often happens that crowdsourcing involves those specialists who, under other conditions, simply would not have the opportunity to take part in a specific task due to various reasons. For example, a person works in the economic sphere, but in fact his vocation is design. He is able to brilliantly perform the tasks associated with the development of design, but for one reason or another did not find permanent place work in this area. That's what the company needs, which attracts talented designers (albeit not quite professional ones) to complete the task;
4) get many options for completing one task and choose the best one. Whereas if this job were done by a full-time employee of your company, you would get only one option for doing it (several at best, but not thousands);
5) get options for the completed task in a clearly defined period of time. Most often, crowdsourcing involves the solution of set goals within a certain time frame. This allows you not to delay the execution of the task indefinitely.
Types of crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing can be divided into areas where it is used and the types of tasks it performs. The areas in which crowdsourcing is used are business, politics, the social and public sphere.
1) Business crowdsourcing. This is perhaps the most common type of crowdsourcing, since it is in the field of business that tasks most often arise, when choosing solutions for which it is best to rely not on a single option, but on many of them, and choose the best one. Examples of crowdsourcing in business: developing a slogan for an advertising campaign, designing a music album cover, etc.
2) Socio-public crowdsourcing. This type of crowdsourcing is based on solving any problems related to socially significant issues and social life of people. Projects related to the search for missing people, construction kindergarten or another object by common efforts or various charitable projects - all this is social crowdsourcing.
3) Political crowdsourcing. This category includes projects related to finding out opinions about certain actions of the state. Typically, this type of crowdsourcing is done in a voting mode.
Tasks that can be completed through crowdsourcing:
1. Create content or product.
2. Search optimal solution in any issue.
3. Search for missing people.
4. Collection and processing of information.
5. Asking for opinions.
distrust of crowdsourcing
There are quite skeptical opinions regarding the use of crowdsourcing. The reasons for this relationship are as follows. First, opponents of crowdsourcing believe that it is impossible to create anything of truly high quality through the crowd. Secondly, true professionals in their field will never pay attention to crowdsourcing projects, since they are mostly unpaid, so to speak, “for an idea”. And working “for an idea” is more the lot of amateurs than professionals. Thirdly, there is a high risk of losing important information. When a company crowdsources a certain project, it provides some information that the performers need to solve the problem. And competitors can easily trace this information and use this knowledge for their own purposes.
To challenge all these opinions or to agree with them is everyone's business. Meanwhile, crowdsourcing has both brilliant examples of its application and completely failed.
Find the most effective solutions various tasks allows the use of the crowdsourcing method. The term "crowdsourcing" (English crowdsourcing, crowd - "crowd" and sourcing - "use of resources"), which refers to the organization of the work of a group of people on a task in order to achieve common benefits, was first used in 2006 by a journalist Geoff Howe in The Rise of Crowdsourcing for Wired magazine.
The idea of crowdsourcing is certainly not new, and many organizations that are not yet familiar with the term have been using crowdsourcing principles in their activities for a long time. However, only the Internet has made this method cheap and widely available in dozens of areas of human knowledge. The development of technology has provided access to information to a huge number of users. The latter circumstance, in turn, narrowed the gap between professionals and amateurs in various fields of knowledge. As a result, organizations have been able to take advantage of the talents of the "network crowd" by engaging millions of people to work on a variety of tasks.
Howe argued that groups of amateurs who work on a task can often produce better results than professionals, because for any work, the one who is most willing to do it is most suitable. Experts, even the smartest ones, will always be more limited than thousands of enthusiasts. And where is the guarantee that professionals in any field are not burdened with the same prejudices as amateurs.
The basis of all projects using crowdsourcing are talented people who are willing to sacrifice their time. Usually, enthusiasts who are engaged in such projects seek not so much to earn money as to obtain moral satisfaction from their work. Perhaps that is why the largest examples of crowdsourcing so far have been non-commercial projects.
With the growing popularity of the traditional type of crowdsourcing, its shortcomings have also become apparent - for example, useless "noise" of ideas generated by users, insufficient motivation of volunteers, and a decrease in the quality of the final product. And yet, despite all the limitations, crowdsourcing is finding new applications in a number of industries. And the "noise" generated by users participating in crowdsourcing projects can be dealt with by properly structuring the task and organizing its execution.
In this way, many people create an idea. Not only moderators, but also participants can assess its need, then this idea is finalized and implemented. It is important that this person does not do it alone, because it’s just boring to implement something alone, but together it’s more fun, and this inspires even more brilliant ideas and deeds.
Crowdsourcing is increasingly and actively used by both business companies and authorities. state power And non-profit organizations. Appears more and more successfully implemented projects using the method of crowdsourcing from drafting laws (for example, the constitution of Iceland is developed using the method of crowdsourcing) and software before making ice cream. The most famous such project is Wikipedia.
Application of the crowdsourcing method in the field of security environment makes it possible to implement large-scale projects covering large areas, which is very important for our country. With development information technologies interested active citizens can constantly participate in the decision environmental issues both in their own region and in other territories.
An example of the application of the crowdsourcing method in the implementation of environmental projects can be various cards, in which all interested citizens take part, marking on these maps the places of environmental violations (unauthorized dumps, places of discharge of uncleaned Wastewater, places of damage or destruction of forests, etc.), protected natural objects, habitats rare species flora and fauna, posting information about the state of a particular environmental object. Also, the crowdsourcing method can be applied to solve any local environmental problem, and each member of the community can act as both a "customer" and an expert.
Let's say your city has some kind of problem in the field of environmental protection, and for sure, someone in your region or in the country as a whole has already encountered such a problem, you can bring this issue up for discussion on the Internet (in in social networks, on thematic resources: websites, forums), you can even create your own resource dedicated to this problem, and representatives of the interested community (public experts) will be able to offer you various options solutions, evaluating which, it will be possible to choose the most suitable and effective for your particular case. You can also act as an expert, offering options for solving various environmental problems set by individuals, organizations, and the state.
Examples of environmental crowdsourcing projects:
- "Virtual Rynda" - http://fires.rynda.org/. Topic: monitoring dangerous environmental situations, fire assistance.
- "Second life of things": map of recycling points - http://www.recyclemap.ru. An interactive map of available collection points for recyclables from the population with the possibility of filling from the side of urban residents.
- "Tugeza" - http://together.ru/ogon. Joint project to coordinate activities during
- fires and planting trees.
- "Greenhunter" - http://greenhunter.ru. A database that collects data on environmentally beneficial organizations and cases.
- "EcoMap of Russia" - http://www.ecokarta.ru. Monitoring and mapping of environmental disturbances and pollution in different cities of Russia (so far the data has been collected mainly for the Novosibirsk region).
- "Ecological map of the Moscow region" - https://ecmo.crowdmap.com/. Monitoring and mapping of environmental problems. (The resource is in its infancy).
- "Ecofront.ru" - http://www.ecofront.ru/. Solving landfill issues.
- "Resource Saving Center" - http://www.centrecon.ru/. A platform created for the comprehensive education and development of Moscow residents, as well as for the possibility of forming both environmentally educational leisure and environmentally significant activities.
- "Radiation Map" - https://radiation.crowdmap.com . resource based interactive map with the ability to leave tags and monitor the activity of events.
- "Garbage.More.No" - http://musora.bolshe.net/. Development of environmental culture through environmental campaigns for garbage collection and planting trees, participates in environmental festivals and conferences
- "All-Russian civil cleaning Let's do it! -2012" - http://sdelaem2012.ru/. Bringing together initiative groups and local citizens to clean up trash from their favorite vacation spots and improve their communities.
- "With the world on a string" - http://smipon.ru/projects?categoryid= 8. Promoting the principles of joint financing of public projects and initiatives in Russia.
According to many specialists from various organizations that use crowdsourcing in their activities, its potential is truly limitless.
Crowd technologies is a set effective tools, working on the principle of making a feasible contribution by many people to some common cause. In general terms, crowd technologies are the use of personal resources of citizens for the production of a product, the development and implementation of a service, or the solution of various social problems.
Such a broad and very capacious definition in terms of meaning can be considered as relevant to reality as possible. In this article, we will try to consider the most effective and common tools from the richest arsenal of crowd technologies that are now fashionable, as well as understand the benefits of their use by social enterprises.
What is it and how can it be useful for social enterprises?
The first thing to note is that crowd technology tools are very effective and there are a huge number of ways to use them, including for social enterprises or entrepreneurs. Moreover, the range of applications is so wide that possible solutions tasks lie not only in the field of finding information or people, generating a stream of feedback, collecting opinions, selecting personnel, but even in creating content, services or products and raising funds for specific goals or projects.
Of course, the most popular of them are crowdsourcing in all its diversity and crowdfunding, which is actively developing in Belarus. By the way, it is even somehow symptomatic that Microsoft Word does not know such words, emphasizing them for us in red ... But both of these tools correct use can be very useful for social enterprises, as they have huge advantages over more familiar and traditional ways of working. The main advantage is the huge audience coverage with minimal cost, direct and personal involvement of users in the project, set deadlines for solving problems and, as a result of all this, saving money and streamlining work processes with an eye to the result.
What problems can await you?
Oooooh ... there will be problems! As with any new social phenomenon. Yes, and which is designed to solve the problem with the availability of finance, employees or ideas. Let's go in order.
1) The very essence of the phenomenon of crowd technologies is very far from society. All this is usually discussed in limited communities, but for the general public and social enterprises it is a dark forest.
2) From the very beginning, even before the start of any crowd campaign and the publication of a social project, you need to clearly define your target audience, correctly present to her all your innovative proposals and present social project, build an open and effective communication, ensuring two-way communication and maximum personal involvement. This is 85% of success, it depends on whether your project will catch the eye, whether it will not scroll in a faceless series of typical crafts.
3) Organizing is only half the battle. Any representative social enterprise, as the author of a crowd project, must be able to work with it. In order for any person, even not greedy and willing to help, to somehow support your project, he must first of all be interested, and in the future to keep his attention. What can we do, we have entered the era of information games, and we need to learn how to play and win in them, to be better than others.
4) You must be trustworthy. With all its appearance, project, openness, methods used. In Belarus, after the difficult times of popular deceit and ongoing dubious financial adventures, it is very difficult to convince strangers give you my money or work for you for free, for an idea. You and your social enterprise need to work really hard.
In the end, I would like to note once again that crowd technologies (in particular, crowdfunding and crowdsourcing, which we will separately consider in more detail in subsequent articles) in themselves are not a panacea or magic wand to solve every conceivable and unimaginable problem of your social enterprise. On their own, by themselves, they cannot discover, create, invent, organize, pay for or conduct anything. These are just tools. They are, of course, excellent, but as is the case with any tools - you need to be able to use them.