Building the right community for your crowdsourcing challenge is just as important as designing the competition itself. You can have a perfectly laid out challenge, but if no one knows about it, how will you get the solutions you are looking for? At HeroX, we know how to recruit the right heroes to win your competition. That’s why we’re providing our top 3 promotional strategies to help ensure the success of your crowdsourcing project.
1. Run a social media ad campaign: this is the easiest way to reach a large number of people, even on a limited budget. Facebook and Twitter have shown us the best results, but you may want to experiment with LinkedIn and Instagram as well depending on your challenge’s subject area. For example, Instagram may be better if your competition is more design focused.
There will be some effort required to setup your ad account on any of these platforms, but it’s easy to get campaigns up and running once you do. You can spend as much or as little as you want while being able to target interests and job titles directly related to your competition.
In addition, have your employees, colleagues, friends, family or partner organizations share your challenge on their accounts as well. This will help amplify your message to people who may not fall within your advertising target audiences and build credibility.
2. Email relevant online publications: the internet is a vast place which usually means there’s likely some sort of online publication or networking association related to your challenge. Find the contact information for the organization (even if it’s a general email address) and send them a friendly message to see if they would be willing to share your crowdsourcing campaign with their members. Be sure to give some background on yourself and why you’re running your challenge. Some organizations will do this as a courtesy for free, while others may have a fee for you to gain access to their community. You will ultimately need to decide what makes sense for your budget, but it certainly doesn’t hurt to ask!
You can also look to posting on large online forum communities such as Reddit. Reddit has many sub-forums dedicated to specific topics where you can share your challenge. Just be aware that your post may get ‘downvoted’ if users feel like you are simply self-promoting and not contributing to the conversation in a meaningful way. Reddit would be a useful resource for those who already have well-established accounts.
3. Attend in-person events: if there are any conferences or meet-ups in your area that are relevant to your challenge, meeting people face-to-face to talk about it is a great way to recruit potential innovators. This also creates a deeper level of trust in the legitimacy of your crowdsourcing campaign when people can get to know the sponsor behind it.
If you’re a larger organization, you can also promote your challenge at your next company event! Include it in the printed program, create a postcard to pass out, or have someone include it in a presentation so attendees have a visual to remember it afterwards.
If you want to run a challenge but don’t have the time to execute any of these promotional strategies, you’re in luck! Our consulting service, CrowdPiper, can handle that part of your crowdsourcing campaign for you. Visit our CrowdPiper site here to learn more or contact our Possibilities team at possibilities@herox.com to get started right away.
