Crowdsourced design platforms like 99designs, crowdSPRING, and DesignCrowd have attracted hundreds of thousands of creatives and paid out millions of dollars in prize money.

With 125 designs submitted per contest, competition on 99designs is tough, and many users can spend hours creating concepts that go nowhere. Indeed, the speculative nature of the work has attracted ire from some groups, though crowdsourcing advocates respond that the opportunities created on these platforms help build up users’ portfolios and can help designers generate income on the side.

In order to educate its users on how to have the best chance of winning a contest, 99designs created an infographic highlighting a successful transaction between designer DSKY and customer After Eleven.

Related:- Carving Out a Creative Crowdsourcing Niche- DesignCrowd Moves into Asia, Eyes Further Expansion- Creative Crowdsourcing Firm 99designs Expands into Latin America, Spain

One of the most important takeaways from the infographic is the number of iterations that took place throughout the course of the contest. DSKY and After Eleven went through four concepts before settling on the winning design. Given that there is no face-to-face interaction between the designer and the customer, listening to feedback is essential for creating a winning pitch. 

Tags: 99desgns, afterelevenfr, crowd-sourcing, crowdsourcing, design

Comments

Genius Crowds, a co-creation company founded in 2010, shuttered its doors last week, bringing an end to the crowdsourcing experiment.

“Today we are announcing that, after a few incredibly creative years, we’ve decided to close Genius Crowds, effective immediately,” the company wrote in an email to its members, which is now posted on its website. “We continue to believe in customer co-creation and collaboration, and are proud to have helped bring an early crowdsourcing product development model to the industry.”

Related:- Mattel Turns to Open Innovation, Pairs with Genius Crowds

Genius Crowds catered to individuals who had ideas they wanted to bring to market. The process involved multiple steps, as the community voted and provided feedback on the submissions. The platform, developed by Chaordix, ran monthly competitions around certain themes and also managed contests for its partner companies. (We covered the platform’s partnership with Mattel here.) Genius Crowd CEO and cofounder CJ Kettler said the company had developed “ten to twenty” such relationships.

On February 12th, the Genius Crowds team posted a blog entry titled “Hiatus,” announcing that monthly competitions were coming to a halt while the company was reevaluating its business model.

“When we went on hiatus, I was exploring a lot of partnerships to see if we could find the right potential partner who would engage with our community of five thousand folks, and we just didn’t find [that partner] within the timetable that I had given it,” Kettler told Crowdsourcing.org. “I’m happy to still engage in those conversations, but personally, I was at a point where I wanted to move on.

“In a lot of ways, for me, Genius Crowds needed to part of a larger entity,” she continued. “As a small startup, we frankly didn’t have enough resources to do the job of business development that we wanted to be able to do.”

Kettler said the kinds of organizations she was considering were market research firms, crowdfunding platforms, and “other players in the crowdsourcing world.”

The blog post announcing the hiatus indicated that the reason for the break was that “…the time to market is long and sometimes arduous, especially for the large corporations we wanted to work with.”

Kettler elaborated to say that she was happy with the way ideas came in and were evaluated; she also said that using gift cards as an incentive for users to participate was the right approach and helped to foster a close and vocal community on the platform. But the users' expectations may have been inflated.

“When you’re dealing with large companies, the expectation of the community is that they will see their products on the shelves [soon] after. And that’s just not realistic, frankly, when you’re dealing with large corporations,” she admitted. “That was probably the most important lesson learned. It takes too long to get answers and for things to move to development. Really, the model should be about ideas and participation, and less about creating a hard, physical product.”

One product that did emerge from the community’s pool of ideas and made it onto the shelves was the Speed Bather, a pet grooming tool.

“Frankly, it was one of few products that we can say moved to market,” Kettler said.

Despite the platform’s closing, Kettler said she is still “very bullish” on the concepts of crowdsourcing and co-creation, and indicated that she will listen to offers from potential partner companies, if any of them approach her. She also thanked her community of more than five thousand members for their participation, lively discussions, and great ideas.

“One of the things I’m most proud of was the level of commitment and also the level of solidarity as a community, which is one of the hardest things to build,” she said.

Tags: cj-kettler, co-creation, crowd-sourcing, crowdsourcing, genius-crowds, speed-bather

Comments

Journalism, as an industry, has gone through difficult times since publications moved online.

Ad revenues are down and local newspapers are closing, leaving many reporters unemployed. Crowdfunding has been brought up as a potential solution, and individual campaigns have shown that the new way of fundraising can, indeed, support journalism.

Consider, for example, Planet Money’s recent Kickstarter campaign that raised nearly $600,000 from over 20,000 backers. Or, the Dutch news startup ‘De Correspondent’ that raised $1.3 million before publishing a single article. On a smaller scale, Homicide Watch D.C., raised over $45,000 for a crime reporting lab.

But we have yet to see a crowdfunding platform for journalism take off in a big way. That’s not to say these platforms don’t exist: one of current players in the space, Emphas.is, focuses on the photojournalism niche and has funded over 45 such projects. But it’s one of very few successful platforms. Spot.us, a pioneer in the crowdfunded journalism field, started off with much promise, but hasn’t funded a story since November 2012.

There’s a lot of untapped potential here, and Vourno, a new platform that launched today, is taking a crack at filling the crowdfunded journalism gap.

The idea for the platform came to the founders two years ago, when they saw the increasingly polarized nature of news. Founder Joseph Verdirame and his team decided to create an alternate way for funding journalism that would lead to more balanced reporting.

“We wanted to allow the public to determine what they want to fund,” he said.

The platform gets its name from the combination ‘video’ and ‘journalism,’ but is not focused only on video reports. The content, Verdirame told Crowdsourcing.org, should have a video component to them, but can be primarily text or photo-based.

Journalists will have a month to raise money through the platform, and must meet their funding goal to receive the cash. Verdirame says the platform will give 91 percent of the funds raised to the reporters (called ‘vournos’), with the rest going toward credit card processing fees and the Vourno team.

Backers (‘pubs’) won’t receive tangible rewards for their donations, like on Kickstarter or Indiegogo, because the funding goals will be much lower ($5000 to $10,000), and because a journalist won’t have the time to design, manufacture, and ship out the doodads while working on a story. The backers’ reward, instead, is being able to shape the news. In addition to funding the stories they want to see covered, pubs will also be able to pitch ideas to reporters.

“What we’re doing is giving journalists who don’t have the ability to pitch to the New York Times, or Al Jazeera, or major networks – we’re giving them the opportunity to raise money and showcase their work on our network,” Verdirame said.

Vourno is launching as a funding and distribution platform, but Verdirame is thinking much bigger in the long run, hoping to turn the portal into an outright news hub. The goal is to show original reports and implement a revenue share model for the funders.

Stories, Verdirame says, will stay on Vourno for a week before their creators will be able to push them out to other outlets. Part of the revenue they earn off the ads will go to the crowd, creating a clear incentive for backers to participate.

That’s still off in the future, thought, and the platform is initially hoping to attract potential journalists and test out the concept before rolling out all the features its creators envision.

“To start, vournos are able to create a story, receive funding, gain independence, build a following, increase credibility, and maximize their exposure,” Verdirame summarized.

One concern in crowfunding journalism is the risk of fraud, as reporters are not supported by a large organization that can vouch for them. Verdirame says his platform will be largely self-policing, with the crowd weeding out potential fraudsters, much like on other platforms. Vourno will also have a rating system to help highlight the most talented stories and reporters. One big incentive for journalists to not run with the money is the fact that reputation is key in the industry – a reporter who is flagged as a fraudster will find it hard to find work in other organizations.

Verdirame acknowledges that breaking into the crowdfunding journalism field may a challenge, with no clear best practices set up and with relatively few success stories to date.

“It’s going to be a challenge to start, but we think there’s an opportunity,” Verdirame said. “We’ve differentiated ourselves by having a distribution platform, by having a rating and ranking system, and by keeping it truly independent where any story can be created.”

With few players making waves in the field, Vourno has little competition to worry about, and a whole industry to fund. We’ll be sure to follow the platform as it develops over the next few months.

Tags: crowd-funding, crowdfunding, crowdfunding-journalism, journalism, vourno

Comments

Tips on Crowdfunding for Medical Bills and Expenses

Tags: crowdfunding, medical-fundraising

Comments

Tags: charities, commercial, community, creative, crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, entrepreneur, investment, small-business, startup

Comments

Cineama [in Italian] is a crowdfunding platform for movie and audiovisual projects.

Tags: audiovisual, crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, movie-projects, movies

Comments

A Social Crowdfunding and Crowdsourcing platform

Tags: crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, social-crowdfunding

Comments

Shekra stands for "Sharek Fekra" and is a specialized crowd funding platform in Egypt dedicated to bridging the gap between entrepreneurs and a wide spectrum of investors. Shekra is a crowd funding solution supporting startups education, legalities, funding, mentoring, and monitoring processes. Shekra has a special focus on upgrading the success rate of startups in the region to cope with global standards.

Tags: crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, egypt, sharek-fekra

Comments

SliceBiz is offering is to leverage web/mobile (& offline) platforms to create a connection between startups looking for funding and business-savvy young professionals/middle class looking to invest.

Tags: alternative-financing, crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, investment-platform

Comments

Tags: crowdsourcing, global-survey, good-education, healthcare, my-world, myworld2015, united-nations, united-nations-global-survey

Comments