We’ve long understood that in business, many heads are better than one. Crowdsourcing is not the same as collaboration, but by opening up work to the masses it’s possible to end up with better results than if just one person did the work – even if no one works together. Crowdsourcing has been used successfully in science, medicine, academia, gaming, art, literature, and more.
The most talked-about crowdsourcing success involved gamers solving a problem that had plagued AIDS scientists for more than 10 years in only 10 days. The gamers successfully used crowdsourcing via fold.it to solve the problem that computers could not. The fact is, crowdsourcing works for many different problems.
Let’s take a look at some interesting crowdsourcing sites and tools that you can use in your business today.
CrowdSPRING.com
Need a logo, graphic design, writing, or even a name for you new business venture? Let crowdSPRING help. You simply submit your needs and pay. Then after a few days you’ll get to choose from many professional designs. Sometimes over 100 are submitted by real designers. There is no risk other than a small fee for not choosing one of the designs, since you have a money back guarantee.
The main advantage to crowdsourcing your project is that the people do the work before you choose which company to go with. You can choose the very best out of many, and often end up with a design that you may have never been exposed to or conceived of choosing. You don’t just see a proposal, you see the actual finished work before you choose.
Indiegogo.com
This is a crowdsourcing site that focuses on collecting funds for different types of projects – termed “crowdfunding”. With indiegogo.com you can raise money for absolutely anything, including businesses or personal needs.
What’s more is that it’s free to get started. You only pay if you raise the money and only a small percentage, which goes down if you actually reach the goal you set. All you need is a real bank account and a legitimate campaign and you can be on your way to collecting the money you need for your venture. After you collect the money you don’t owe anything back because it is not a loan. You can offer perks and gifts to contributors but you don’t have to pay back the money.
Ziptask.com
If you need work done but don’t want to worry yourself with hiring multiple people or worry about outsourcing, you can use Ziptask. Ziptask bills itself as a fully managed outsourcing via the crowd. A real human looks at the job you upload and gives you an estimate on the project that you don’t want to go over. If you accept it, they then find people to do the work for you that will not exceed that price. They check the work, then submit it back to you complete.
Your work will get done quickly because there are many contractors who are skilled enough to do your work. The quality is good because a real human checks it and if there are issues they fix them.
These three websites offer tools that any business owner or professional can use, whether they are online business owners or offline business owners. You’ll never know if crowdsourcing is right for you if you don’t give it a try. Start with a small project and see what you think.