Tip: Your Messaging

What is the messaging of your crowdsourcing project or competition?

To effectively market your competition, you will first need to figure out what audiences you will want to reach and how to frame the messaging to get them interested in participating. Utilize the problem statement, 30 second pitch and value of the breakthrough you created on your crowdsourcing page to help get you started. If there are multiple audiences you will be targeting, be sure to customize the language for each one.

  • For example: the Cognitive Computing Challenge was solving a problem in the oil/gas pipeline industry but the solution could be applied to other companies across various industries.

    • This is how they framed their messaging to companies outside of the pipeline industry: “Businesses will no longer have to use valuable human resources to scan, read and analyze information which will reduce time, minimize cost, increase frequency of analysis and exponentially increase capacity”.
    • For those in their own industry, they reframed the messaging by stating: “Being able to process unstructured data will provide companies an opportunity to seeing true leading indicators of pipeline performance”.

Make this message your basis of how you promote your compeititon not only on the crowdsourcing page itself, but also:

  • Recruitment of sponsors, partners and innovators
  • Content generation (for Facebook, Twitter, G+, Instagram, etc.)
  • Media promotion (press release, interviews, etc.)
  • Informal communications (internal and external)

Your messaging should be a “living” document until you are fully ready to launch. This is mainly due to how the competition can evolve as the guidelines are developed, so be sure to revisit your messaging once they are finalized. You should also adjust your messaging if you're discovering that the current wording is not resonating with audiences that you are targeting (e.g. if you have a low number of competitors halfway through your competition, review the crowdsourcing page and your email templates to see where improvements can be made).