http://ping.fm/YGyvL
http://su.pr/2AmrsN
Unleashing Crowd Power, Part 5
by Michal Hudecek on February 17, 2012
Last article of a five part guest posts series,“Unleashing Crowd Power”, by Michal Hudecek.
Working with the Motivation Wheel
Although the Motivation Wheel can be used as a tool for measuring the motivation of the crowd retrospectively on each crowdsourcing project, its core benefit lies within the concept design phase. Defining which motives you are trying to maximize can help you prioritize what to focus on during the development.
What should people think and feel when participating at your crowdsourcing project? What can you offer? For each factor you decide to use, take into account following suggestions.
1) Pride
Motivation wheel: Pride
Help the best contributors become famous. Make sure their contributions are visible and easily sharable via social networks. Regularly announce the most active participants in as many channels as possible. Create a profile page where they can promote themselves or their projects. Make them compete against each other.
2) Fun
Motivation wheel: Fun
Visualization is fun. Use progress bars or any other visual elements where possible. Replace boring writing with drag and drop or simple clicking. Give the crowd a single number to strive for, whether it is amount of articles or number of ideas shared. Create interesting graphs or publish infographics showing admirable figures. To do so, hire a talented graphic designer or use some good looking pre-build solutions such as Crowdgene.
Game elements are fun. Talk to your children about why they like playing computer games (especially massively multiplayer online role-playing games, so called MMORPGs). Incorporate leveling and award systems. Study works of Jane McGonigal, Tom Chatfield or others (you can find even more inspirational books at my LinkedIn profile) .
3) Impact
Motivation wheel: Impact
If you want to focus on the impact factor, make sure your vision is strong enough and easy to communicate. Get inspired by Fold It. Just discovering how proteins could fold might not be a powerful message but helping to cure HIV is. Create a short professionally-looking video to get your message through
4) Relationships
Motivation wheel: Relationships
The feeling of a connection can be the reason why people spend a lot of time supporting the local film director on social networks without any reward in exchange. Similarly, the relationship the customers have with your organization might be a good enough reason to participate in your crowdsourcing project. However, it needs to be said that corporations usually overestimate this factor. Try to be realistic about how big fans your customers are.
Another type of bond can be developed among the users themselves. Provide them with enough space to meet, talk and work together.
5) Money
Motivation wheel: Money
Think twice about using money as a motivation factor. Not only cuts it a slice from your crowdsourcing budget, even a little financial incentive might shift the users’ behavior significantly as it might draw attention from all the other factors.
Conclusions
When developing any kind of web site, think first about desired feelings and thoughts of your visitors. The same goes for crowdsourcing projects. If you are still deciding about running one, make sure the work can be divided into small individual tasks, the cost of integrating them back together is low, enough people are able to participate and you can provide enough motivation to attract them.
The reason why people participate on crowdsourcing projects is because they lack one or more motivation factors in their day to day job – Pride, Fun, Impact, Relationships or Money. Use Motivation wheel and make sure you can provide them with proper substitute. You can check Motivation wheels of famous crowdsourcing projects to get inspired. Help the best contributors become famous, use gamification and visualization to make it fun, learn to communicate your vision, provide enough space for contributors to network or, if really needed, provide financial incentives.
About Michal Hudecek
Managing director of Maintop Businesses, a Czech company focused on discovering and developing new innovative online businesses. Author of Web Directing Framework and Motivation Wheel Concept. He occasionally comments on user experience and crowdsourcing both in local and international TV and press. You can follow him on Twitter @michalhudecek
