Many people turn to crowdsourcing when they bump up against budgetary constraints. However, there are advantages of crowdsourcing that go beyond their cost-effectiveness.
These include increased engagement with your brand, reduced burdens on management, and higher rates of success for problems and projects. In this article we will cover some other benefits of crowdsourcing.
Tapping Into a Collective
Crowdsourcing is a collaborative effort. It brings people together with a common purpose, and it often results in one person building on the intelligence of the next. Essentially, it runs on open innovation, a participatory method of problem-solving.
Open innovation allows for a greater range of creativity, flexibility, and diversity within your work. In addition, a crowdsourced project can attract fresh eyes from all walks of life, generating ideas that surprise you or bringing you thoughts and perspectives that you’d never considered before.
This typically results in a wide range of solutions, too. As a business owner, you’ll be able to comb through all kinds of ideas, making your own judgments about everything from efficacy to profitability. You can cast your net wide but only bring home the choice prizes.
Building Contacts
If you’re a business owner who is always on the lookout for new talent, crowdsourcing can essentially function as a job interview. You can identify and recruit employees based on the ideas, perspectives, or results that they drive toward you.
Even if you’re unable or unwilling to hire new people, however, crowdsourcing can put skilled professionals on your radar. They might become contacts within your network that you can call on for their expertise. Some might even agree to work as independent contractors as needed, even if they aren’t interested in full-time employment.
Another benefit of recruiting from a crowdsourced project is that you have a greater chance of finding cooperative employees. You’ll already know that they can function in teams or handle projects as co-creatives. If they wind up solving your problem, you can look at their results as their resume, too.
Reducing Burdens on Management
In a crowdsourced project, people tend to manage themselves. It is called self-management, and studies have shown that it’s a viable strategy for everything from saving time to improving employee morale and productivity.
Crowdsourcing doesn’t have to run on self-management, but the potential is there. It can become a hands-off period for businesses.
Managers can use it as an opportunity to free themselves from the usual time- and energy-intensive tasks of project supervision. Entrepreneurs can use it to bring exposure to their brand while still building and developing their business behind the scenes.
Increasing Engagement with Your Brand
Some businesses create challenges and competition out of their crowdsourced projects. For example, they advertise on social media, and they offer rewards for good ideas.
There are many advantages to hosting a crowdsourced project like this, including:
- Increased brand recognition,
- Marketing buzz for products or services,
- Professional exposure for everyone involved in the challenge,
- The creation of an “ideas portal” or “knowledge database” that you can return to in the future.
All of these benefits tie back to engagement. More potential clients will see you, remember you, and form a positive association with your brand. If you’re crowdsourcing for something like new product launches, you can also create brand loyalty through customers who are excited to see their ideas come to life.
Saving Money
Last but not least, crowdsourcing can be a way to increase your profits by cutting your expenses. Rather than paying traditional labor costs, including wages, you can outsource your problem without paying a dime.
It’s also possible to generate income through crowdsourcing, though this can be more intangible and harder to quantify. For example, the marketing buzz that you build with a social media challenge might lead to record sales of a new product, and it all started with crowdsourcing.
The Bottom Line
Ultimately, crowdsourcing can be an efficient and affordable method of solving problems or bringing new ideas to your business. While traditional methods aren’t without merit, crowdsourcing has too many advantages to ignore.
