One day we will teach teh cats to type, sing and project manage. (image via Ben Pearce)

“Like it? Well, I don’t see why I oughtn’t to like it. Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every day?”

— Tom Sawyer incentivizes his friends to whitewash a fence in Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer, Chapter Two, 1876

Attempting to solicit help with an article recently (ironically, an entry for “content strategy” on Wikipedia), I revisited some thoughts I’ve been having about strategies for successfully crowdsourcing content. You may have any of several reasons you need to crowdsource: usually, you just don’t have time, expertise, or money, resources, or employees to do it yourself. Non-profits, for example, are increasingly tapping into the crowd to help evangelize their myriad causes for many of those reasons. So what are some things to keep in mind to ensure your attempts to crowdsource are efficient and effective?

1. Be Clear About What You’re Looking For

The more precisely you frame your solicitation, the more likely you’ll entice and inspire contributors. We all have a lot to process daily, so sending folks a vague entreaty will probably only provoke a middling response. Your request should explicit about what you need, direct about how and where it can be completed, clear in explaining why the request applies directly to the recipient, and it should intimate why folks would want to contribute in the first place. (More on that in a moment.) Since we’re talking about crowd-sourcing here, you should also point out that efforts contributed can be small, so that folks understand they’re not being asked to complete an entire task on their own.

2. Tap into Networks

You’re probably familiar with the typically abysmal response rates to polls, surveys and other online implorations. Few people who read blogs actually comment on them or contribute to them. Getting folks to create content for free is no mean task. That means you’re going to have to put some time into reaching out to a large pool of potential contributors and you’ll also want to be efficient about how you do that. Fortunately, the Web provides a zillion outlets for networks and you can often quickly discover some you may not have been aware of. In addition to any professional associations, you’ve probably established a network on Twitter, for example, and there’s a Facebook group for everyone from weasel lovers (82 members) to Bluegrass fans (2828 members). You should tap into as many networks as possible, but ensure they’re carefully selected, so you’re not just spamming subscribers. An email to all your 400 friends on Facebook might be perceived as spam, but an email to a group with 25,000 members with the same interest might not – if your entreaty’s explicit and your incentives are clear.

3. Offer Incentives

So, yeah, incentives. One of the great mysteries for some folks is why people would want to contribute content for free in the first place. Aside from financial remuneration (which probably isn’t an option if you’re crowdsourcing), there are many intangible incentives for people to contribute content for free – you just have to enunciate what those incentives are. Sure, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk offers people (often laughably miniscule) micropayments to create, modify, massage, and otherwise slap content into shape, but sites like Yahoo! Answers, Yelp, and Wikipedia offer folks zero financial remuneration. What they do offer instead are opportunities to establish oneself as an authority, to be ranked among a large community of contributors (Amazon mastered this ages ago), to feel a sense of contribution and community, and, simply, to have your ego stroked for airing your knowledge. Arguably, creating content for free even provides an outlet for the obsessive compulsive among us to rid themselves of excess energy.

We’re gaining some clarity around why people contribute content for free, too. In their paper “Why Do People Write for Wikipedia?” (link to PDF), Georgia Tech’s Andrea Forte and Amy Bruckman assert that Wikipedia’s ostensibly uncredited contributors tap into an incentive system similar to that of the scientific community’s. People contribute not to accrue financial reward, but credit or credibility, which gives them increasing notice and influence in the Wikipedia community. They also conclude that “providing some obvious indication of what kinds of activities warrant higher levels of credibility may help fledgling communities grow in desirable directions as participants invest their time and identities.” Sound advice for anyone attempting to develop a community of online contributors from scratch.

So, this article includes its own little opportunity in crowdsourcing. Remember that article on “content strategy” on Wikipedia mentioned above. Why not see what you can contribute to the evolving article over there? Regardless of your motivation.