Chapter 10

Engaging the Crowd with Your Project

In This Chapter

Knowing what attracts a crowdworker

Getting crowdworkers on board

Setting up an Internet-based hub for the project

Using training as a promotional tool

When you start crowdsourcing, you need an idea, a means of dividing labour, a platform for the work, and, of course, a crowd. If you don’t have a crowd or if you’re building a self-organised crowd (a group of people given a task and told to solve it in the way they think is best), you have to recruit members. If you’re using a commercial market, you may find that the crowd’s already gathered at your gates and is waiting to find work. However, even in this case, you may find yourself looking to grow the crowd.

The first steps of building a crowd are very similar to the work of Internet marketing. You’re trying to attract a group of workers to your project, so you build a presence on the web via websites, social media pages and blogs, through which you express the goals and ideas of your crowdwork. You can use conventional tools as well, and you can recruit people from organisations such as civic organisations or college alumni networks who may be interested in your project. No matter how you do it, you’re trying to get people to come to your project.

You can think of the work of attracting or building a crowd as a form of crowdsourcing – using a small crowd to attract a bigger crowd. You do this by giving your small crowd (call it the seed crowd) the task of contacting friends who may be interested in your project. The crowd members can go through their social networks, the organisations they support, their family and their friends.

Using a crowd to attract a crowd is perhaps most useful when you’re involved in crowdfunding, but no matter what you’re doing with crowdsourcing, you start by building a crowd. And that’s exactly what this chapter helps you do.

Getting Started with Crowdbuilding

The following sections provide some of the basics you need to grasp before you dive in to pull together a crowd.

Knowing what motivates the crowd

The first rule of business is: know your market. The rule applies to crowdsourcing; to attract a crowd, you need to understand that crowd.

Chapter 2 explains who the members of the crowd are. The crowd members have all sorts of reasons for being part of the crowd:

Altruism: Some give their wages to charity and feel that they’re improving the world. Others get involved with crowdfunding to support a cause they believe in.

A feeling of belonging: Some are following the lead of others.

Building skills or experience: Some crowdworkers are looking to plump up their portfolios – or perhaps use skills they don’t get to use in their day jobs.

Identity: By engaging in crowdsourcing, they feel they’re being identified with something they admire.

Money: Some workers are attracted solely by money. For them, crowdworking is the best job they can find, or the best way to use their skills, or the best place for them to work at certain hours or in certain places of the globe. These workers can only be attracted through financials rewards. The higher the price you offer for each task, the more likely you are to get these workers into your crowd.

When you recruit people to join your crowd, you’re involved in a transaction. You offer something to the potential members of the crowd and they’re free to accept your offer or reject it. You need to be sure to offer something that the crowd wants. For example, the crowdsourcing site Zooniverse offers no money to its crowd, yet has a crowd of over half a million people. It rewards the crowd members by giving them the opportunity to be involved in important scientific research. The crowd members can do work that was once restricted to big universities and important laboratories.

Identifying the talent and resources you need

When you’re preparing to recruit a crowd, you should first sit down and identify the skills you need in the members of the crowd. If you require translation, the crowdworkers need to know multiple languages. If your project is about categorisation, the crowdworkers need to be able to recognise the categories. If your project is technical, the crowdworkers need technical skills.

If you need too many skills for your job, you may not have divided the work properly into crowdsourcing tasks. If your plan requires you to have a crowd of Japanese-speaking Java coders who understand something about finance, you haven’t broken your work into its component parts. You should be able to break your job into tasks that require one, or at most two, identifiable skills.

Don’t overestimate the skills that you need. You may think that your job requires someone with at least a graduate degree, but you may get better results from a crowd with a more common set of skills that you can train in the specific skill that you need. Crowdsourcing can involve teaching as well as working.

Adapting your strategy for public and private crowds

A private crowd is made up of people within your network, like employees of your company or users of an organisation’s services, whose common expertise, experience or loyalty you want to access. A public crowd is made up of all sorts of people with varying levels of skill who show interest in your crowdsourcing.

You can use the techniques for building a crowd to create public or private crowds. However, the two crowds are not quite the same, and so you get a slightly different result when you’re building a private crowd from when you’re building a public crowd. In the case of public crowds, you recruit from a population of people who’re ready to work but may not have the right skills or experience. In the case of private crowds, you’re recruiting from people who’re more likely to have the right skills but who may not be inclined to do crowdwork.

Use this guidance for each type of crowd:

Public: Attract as many people as you can to your project and then winnow out those who don’t have the right skills.

Private: Convince people with the right skills that they should devote some of their time to your crowd. They may be reluctant to join because they don’t like to work over the Internet, or because they don’t want to spend their time working on your project, or because they think that their boss won’t want them to join the crowd.

Inviting People to Join Your Crowd

When you build a crowd, you often start with conventional marketing. You announce an activity and ask people to join in. This is your starting point even if you’re going to use the crowd to help you recruit others or try to build a self-organised crowd.

Your first efforts can follow traditional models. You can post a call for a crowd on your web page. You can post it on Facebook. You can send it to community bulletin boards. You can use Twitter. All these are mechanisms for building a crowd.

If you’re trying to build a big crowd (and many projects need a large number of workers), you can use many forms of media and tie them back to a single blog, Facebook page or LinkedIn entry through feeds and pingbacks or other mechanisms. That way, you can post a message once but send it to many people through many forms of media.

The following sections provide guidance for seeing the numbers of your crowd swell.

Seeding the crowd

No one likes to be the first person at the party. You stand at the door, talk awkwardly with the host for a moment, and let all the social doubts fly through your head. Perhaps you remembered the wrong time, or date or address. Perhaps the host has such a reputation for bad parties that no one else is willing to come. Perhaps the party is a surprise party and you’re about to be embarrassed.

Similarly, you don’t to be the first person to join a crowd. You start to wonder about similar issues. Is this crowd legitimate? Will the crowdsourcer actually pay us? Does the rest of the crowd know something that I don’t?

Invite a small group of trusted people to start the crowd, before you start inviting the general public. This method not only allows you to complete some of the work before members of the public come to your job, but also allows you to test your tasks with a small, trusted group of people.

If you’re building a private crowd, you should certainly start with a small group. You may have a list of most of the potential members. You may take names from the list of company employees, or the membership roll of your organisation, or the directory of residents in a certain neighbourhood. You may even have direct email addresses for all these people and be able to send them individual invitations to join the crowd. They’ll be your best advocates for the rest of the organisation. You may even want to bring them into your group, give them a special briefing, and make them feel as if they’re part of your inner team.

For a charitable or civic job, you may consider recruiting prominent individuals into the crowd. You then ask them not only to endorse the work but also to actually do some crowd labour. You can publish the number of tasks they’ve completed and challenge the community to meet and exceed the accomplishments of these individuals. (Of course, this strategy works well only if these prominent individuals actually do the work.)

Engaging on YouTube

Video’s a powerful means of attracting people to your project. For some forms of crowdsourcing, such as crowdfunding, you’re almost required to have a video. A video gives a lift to your project. It allows you to explain the value of your project directly to the crowd. It can explain a complicated idea in just a few seconds.

You can use YouTube as your video platform. The YouTube site is well indexed in search engines, easily accessible and easy to use. You can film your video with a simple camera or phone and upload the video to YouTube. You can then circulate the video by sending the link through Twitter, by email, on Facebook or through other forms of communication.

When you create a video, make sure your story’s simple and clear. Ensure good light, so that you can see people’s faces and hear their voices. More importantly, make sure you’re explaining your project clearly and that you’re emphasising the benefits of the project to the crowd.

When you make a promotional video, send the message ‘Join my crowdsourcing project because it will be good for you.’ You need to tell the crowd members the benefits that they can get from doing the tasks. Tell them that they can gain skills or that they can engage all their talents, that they can help a good cause or that they’ll be earning money in the service of a business that’s trying to help its community.

Granting bragging rights

Your crowd is usually your best advertisement. The members tell their friends and colleagues of their work. You can encourage the crowd to spread the news of your crowdsourcing project by giving the members bragging rights, by recognising them for their accomplishments, and letting them spread the news of their work.

Bragging rights are crucial to crowdcontests. Unless you have a strong reason to keep the results private, you want to let every winner brag about his success in your contest. The winner gets added compensation by being recognised as accomplished. You get additional attention for your crowdcontest. You may also want to consider some form of recognition for members of the crowd who are finalists or who produced unusually good work.

Fostering Community Spirit

A good crowdsourcing project is about community. You bring a group of people together to do some work, to fund an activity, to build a product, to find information. You may find it useful to let the crowd build a community of its own. You can encourage the members to communicate with each other in a variety of ways. You can use blogs to post messages. You can use Twitter hash tags to do the same thing. You can use a Flickr account to let the members post images of their work. With these kinds of things, you can help your crowd to feel it has a common identity.

When your crowd’s established a common identity, you can use that identity to promote your project and encourage other people to join. You can send messages that say that you have a good community that’s doing engaging work. You’re encouraging others to appreciate that work and join in with it themselves.

Some people are cautious about letting the members of crowd use a blog or Twitter to communicate with each other. Indeed, sometimes a crowd may use such tools to communicate their dissatisfaction with the job or with you as the organiser of the activity. (You may want to read Chapter 14 on managing crowds before you create a blog for your crowdsourcing work.) Still, most crowdsourcing experts believe that blogs and Twitter hash tags are good things. If problems exist, the crowd will find a way to talk. You can be better prepared if you see the messages than if you don’t. Running the blog is a good way to catch problems.

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Building an online base

If you don't build an online base for your crowd, you're inviting someone else to build it for you. The base can be something as simple as a Facebook page or a community blog. It can also be a multi-topic forum that allows workers to post comments, to chat or to share information. All the major crowdsourcing companies have bases like these – Amazon's Mechanical Turk has mturk forum (http://mturkforum.com); Zooniverse has the Zooniverse Blog (www.blog.zooniverse.org) (see the sidebar The Zooniverse community); CrowdFlower has a site on the Get Satisfaction platform (https://getsatisfaction.com/crowdflower).

Most of these online bases are divided into two sections. The first section is an official blog that’s controlled by the crowdsourcer. This blog is a place for news, updates, tips and other information about the project. The second section is usually under the control of the workers, and contains observations about the work, more tips, suggestions about other jobs that can be found on the web, and other information of interest to crowdworkers. For large projects, the workers’ forum is often divided into multiple strands: conversations about work, personal chatter, observations and so on.

Showing how tasks contribute to the overall goal

When you start crowdsourcing, you can’t expect the crowdworkers to understand the job as you understand it. They’ll understand it from the bottom up, and you need to help them understand the big picture by describing how the individual tasks support your goals, and by stating clearly the connection between the two.

Have you heard the story of the woodcutters? A traveller enters a village and finds three people cutting wood. He asks the three workers what they’re doing.

‘Cutting wood,’ says the first.

‘Constructing a building,’ says the next.

‘Building a meeting hall so that the village may gather and prosper,’ is the final reply.

The lesson for crowdsourcing and crowdbuilding is that you can encourage the crowd by showing it how their work connects to your goals.

Identifying benefits

Every workplace – no matter how technical, how global, how diverse – is a place to grumble. Workers gather at the water cooler or in the tea room and talk about the things that bother them. To counteract this, in trying to build a community within the crowd, you may need to explain the benefits of the work at your online base. Your workers will quickly see the things that you will get out of the work. They need to see what things they will get from joining your crowd.

Express your benefits as broadly as you can. Certainly many crowdworkers will respond to the payments that you offer. However, most also look beyond the payments and hope to see something more. Will they be improving a community? Will they gain new skills? Will they add to the world’s stock of knowledge? Will they make life a little more comfortable for a child with fewer resources than themselves? Be sure to give as many benefits as you can.

Don’t claim benefits that you can’t offer. Crowdworkers don’t appreciate lies and deceit. You don’t want to be known as a crowdsourcer who makes claims that aren’t true – that will mean the end of your crowdsourcing.

Updating the crowd on progress

If workers don’t see progress, they can easily believe that no progress is being made, even if they complete hundreds or thousands of tasks. So when you try to build a community within the crowd, keep the workers aware of the overall progress of your project.

You can think of these reports of progress as a dialogue with the crowd. Tell the crowd what it’s accomplished, what it’s done towards completing your job. The crowd can take pride in what it’s accomplished and use this information to make decisions about which tasks to take next. If you have a lot of work remaining, the crowd members may decide to invest time to learn your tasks, because they’ll have plenty of opportunity to use those skills. In addition, by publically talking about the progress of the task, you may attract new crowd members.

Most crowdsourcing organisations create this dialogue using a blog. (Blogs are now so common that few organisations consider doing any kind of a crowdsourcing effort without one.) You can, however, just as easily use a Facebook page or an email update in which a senior member of the team reports on the status of the work. These posts can also be a way of encouraging the crowd. They can report on individual accomplishments, such as recognising an individual worker who’s accomplished an unusual amount of work, or share details of best practices with the crowd.

Dialogue works both ways. Listen to the crowd. On your online base, create room for crowd members to talk to you – commenting on a blog post or Facebook, for example. The crowd give you more loyalty if it perceives you as a human being who’s interested in the crowd and is focused on achieving a goal, rather than seeing a faceless web page that gives a brief description of the work. Listening to the crowd also helps you manage it; head over to Chapter 14 for more on managing crowds.

Try using photos to humanise the crowd. If you open a Flickr account or find another way to post images of the crowd at work, you’ll find that it becomes a more effective and contented group. By putting a face to every name, you let people visualise their co-workers and understand them as human beings.

Sustaining the Crowd’s Interest

You need to keep the crowd interested in your work. Only for certain forms of macrotasking can you ignore the need to refresh your crowd and keep it interested in your work. For microtasking, contests, self-organised crowds, crowdfunding and all the other variations of these basic forms, you need to work to sustain the interest of the crowd.

Crowds are most interested in those who offer a regular supply of work. If you offer different amounts of work from day to day or from week to week, the crowd may start to view you as unreliable and look elsewhere for opportunities.

If you use a commercial crowdsourcing platform, you can be less concerned about offering a steady amount of work. Your jobs will be aggregated with the jobs of others. The crowd is less aware that you may be offering more jobs one week than the next. However, even if you use these services, you’re more likely to get greater loyalty from the crowd if you offer a steady amount or at least a predictable amount of work.

You can also boost the loyalty of the crowd by keeping it informed of progress. You usually get the best results when you describe progress in terms of the things that the crowd has accomplished, not the things that you’ve done. Keep the focus on the crowd and help it see the benefits of what it’s done.

Teaching and Training

Teaching and training are an important part of managing crowdsourcing, and they can also be a useful tool for promoting your project. When you create material to show the crowd why a task is important, how it can do the work and what results it can expect, you can also use that material to recruit new workers to the crowd. You can put the training material in a public place on the web and direct potential workers to it. You can tell them that this material explains what they’ll do, the skills that they need to join the crowd, and the opportunities they’ll get by working in your crowd.

You’re more likely to produce vibrant and engaging training material if you also plan to use the material to promote your project. When you produce material to use in this way, you tend to emphasise the final product and the benefits of that project – which is more engaging than a mere description of the task.

Training materials shouldn’t be the only form of promotion. However, they can extend and augment the messages that you send to rally a crowd.

Showing the outcome

The crowd likes to know the outcome of the work. It’s more likely to engage if it knows what you want – what product you hope to see at the end. When you prepare training materials, make sure that you have a document, podcast or video that shows the results of the crowdsourcing. Depending on the task, show the final product: a completed database, a well-written paragraph, an edited photograph, a transcription for an audio file.

You need to do little, if anything, to adapt this kind of training material to promote your project. You can create a tweet, or a Facebook posting, or even an email with a link to your training material and the words, ‘Join our project and you can create this kind of thing.’

Leading the crowd through the tasks

At first, you may conclude that a detailed list of instructions isn’t a good tool for recruiting people to your project. Indeed, most people don’t find lists of instructions compelling or even interesting. If you think you can post your instructions on a website and that these instructions will draw a crowd to your project, you’re mistaken. You should never think that only a list of instructions will bring the crowd to your project.

However, you can use some of your instructions to promote your project when these instructions demonstrate the skills that members of the crowd will learn. Remember that part of the advantage of crowdsourcing is that the crowd gets to acquire new skills. If you can use your instructions or an edited version of your instructions to show the skills that the crowdworkers will gain, you’ve demonstrated an additional benefit to the workers.

If you were raising a crowd to process graphical images you might promote it by posting a photograph and part of the instructions. For example, ‘Can you identify the faces in this photograph? If so, you can help us organise the art collection at the County Museum. You’ll help us understand our pictures, tell us what they show and, who knows, maybe find a lost master work.’

You can also use instructions to reduce the concerns of potential crowd members. If you’ve had trouble getting people to do tasks, and have been unable to get the crowd to respond via increases in payments, then you may be facing a crowd that believes that your task is more complicated than it is. You can illustrate the simplicity by posting your instructions in a public place and directing the crowd to them. Of course, the instructions have to be simple. If they appear complicated, you simply confirm the fears of the crowd.

For the lowdown on writing clear instructions, see Chapter 11.

Engaging on YouTube (again)

YouTube’s become an important tool for training crowdworkers. A 90- second video can train a crowd in a way that pages of documents can’t. Training videos don’t take the place of promotional material, but they can be a useful supplement. They can illustrate the nature of the work that you’re offering, especially the social aspects. Many crowdworkers like to engage with other members of the crowd. You can show how they can work together with a simple training video.

Training videos usually supplement promotional materials. You may circulate a link to them with the note, ‘For more information, you can look at our training video.’