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Crowdsourcing for Nonprofits

Crowdsourcing is the practice of submitting challenges or problems to an online group for their input. Have you ever used crowdsourcing for anything? If not, you might be missing out on a powerful tool.

Nonprofits could do lots of things with crowdsourcing:

1. Fundraising - This should be obvious. Your organization could use a crowdsourcing site like Kickstarter.com to raise money for general operations, or for a specific purpose.

2. Marketing - You can also crowdsource advertising, branding, and marketing challenges. There are sites for those things, including Crowspring, Kluster, 99Designs, and PopTent.

3. Naming Things - Stumped trying to come up with a name for a campaign, program, or project? I guess this can happen. Why not use crowdsourcing to solicit ideas?

4. Program Design - Designing a program that will do a great job of meeting a certain need, say mental health assistance for homeless people, might not be tough all of the time. Sometimes you might want a whole crowd to help you out.

5. Advocacy and public education - These two nonprofit tasks could be considered part of marketing. You could get some great ideas by asking for help designing a new campaign to change minds, inform a certain audience, or influence voting behavior.

6. Solving Social Problems - How do we help people escape extreme poverty? What's the best way to engineer a transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy? If your work relates to solving a big social problem, crowdsourcing may lead to better solutions.
A Web search might lead you to a crowdsourcing site that's devoted to solving social problems, but I couldn't find one. Maybe someone needs to create a social innovation crowdsourcing site.

Your crowdsourcing effort and results should be featured in your electronic communications. Getting good ideas for your new public education campaign? Blog about that! Mention the "winning" ideas in your e-newsletter. Create a Web page to describe the new effort.

You could try crowdsourcing with your own Web site. Do you have a decent amount of Web traffic? Do you have a forum on your site, or could you add one? Do you have a specific challenge for which you'd like to solicit ideas? If you answered "yes" to all of those questions, then you can start your own little crowdsourcing effort.
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