Recently, a counterpart contacted me to get some insights about how to attract and activate “solvers” on a platform. That person had validated a business need to create a crowdsourcing platform, but was now looking to assemble the community to respond to the challenges he would launch on its platform. How do you assemble a community? Some tips are already available in this book, but it’s a bit dated. Here are some findings from a project that we just published as a book chapter, along with Daren Brabham and Jean-François Lemoine.

Communities don’t just exist, you can’t just pick them up. When your business model is based on contributions from the crowd, you have to assemble a community early on before “selling” anything to the companies that are wanting to tap into the crowd. How do you do that? At eYeka, we have a rough 50/50 split between organic aquisition (people come by themselves, after reading press articles or hearing from their friends) and paid aquisition (people come after clicking on online ads, like Google Adwords).

Below is our current landing page for filmmakers, for example:

Today, the academic and profesionnal literatures don’t really talk about recruiting individuals to crowdsourcing platforms. Not that it is a major theoretical void to fill – it’s a managerial topic – but we wanted to share some insights about this need to recruit members. Hence, we wrote that chapter, soon to be published in “Advances in crowdsourcing.” Here’s the abstract:

This study operationalizes different motivational categories to participate in crowdsourcing, and tests them with a series of (Google Adwords) advertisements in different countries. We found that internalized extrinsic motivations were more appealing to individuals overall, and that results differed across countries, which is novel in research about crowdsourcing.

Crowdsourcing across cultures has been written about, but not when it comes to online member recruitment. I’ll be honest, it’s not rocket science and it’s very managerial in nature; you won’t find much theory. But we thought that it was interesting knowledge to share, both the numbers and the topic, and therefore published it together in the book, published by Springer.

Read more about the “Advances in crowdsourcing” book here. If you are interested in the article, I would be happy to send you the pre-print version, just get in touch with me.

Note: For this project, all three authors sincerely thank Edouard Breine, previously Traffic and Community Manager at eYeka, for helping in the process of data collection.