The Word
Crowdsourcing is the combination of the words ‘crowd’ and ‘outsourcing’. Its the process of getting any work done, by a group or crowd of people, online. So basically, its nothing but taking work and outsourcing it to a group of people.
The Benefit
Crowdsourcing means having more people for any given job, than having only one person do it. The generation of ideas & the content quality is really exceptional, as a result of gathering large number of people.
How does Crowdsourcing work?
The client goes to a crowdsourcing platform in order to launch a project/contest relevant to the requirement. The client makes the choice of the package for the requirement as well as the time duration for which the project would run on the platform. After that, the project brief is submitted and the payment is made. Post this, the project/contest goes live & freelancers registered with the platform get the intimation about the same. They start working on the requirement in accordance to the project brief and keep submitting their entries to the project/contest until the project time duration is over. Now the client has to peruse through the entries in order to choose the one that best fits the requirement. Once chosen, the entry submitting freelancer is declared the winner and gets the prize money. The project/contest gets closed once the handover of the files is completed between the winning freelancer & the client.
The Growth of the Crowdsourcing Industry
With the world becoming a highly connected & small place today thanks to the internet, crowdsourcing is growing very rapidly. Clients from all over the globe are using crowdsourcing services to get their requirements completed, saving a lot of valuable time and money while getting very diverse and large number of solutions from freelancers worldwide. Crowdsourcing is largely used by clients these days to get solutions in the field of Design, Content, Web Development & many other Service based industries.
Pros & Cons
Needless to say, crowdsourcing’s biggest advantage is the ability to receive better quality results, since so many people come together to offer their best skills, ideas & support. It allows you to select the best results from a vast number of entries, as compared to receiving the best entry from a single person. Since crowdsourcing unplugs the power of the internet & freelancing, results are available much quickly as compared to traditional methods. For eg. you can receive a finished design or idea within or less than a week. Clear & concise instructions are very essential for crowdsourcing efficiently. Its very much possible that you’ve to go through hundreds of submitted solutions/entries, and it can be really cumbersome as well as complicated, if your starting instructions were not clear to the people working on your requirement. Thus, quality becomes subjective and it becomes very difficult to evaluate the results if the crowdsourcing project brief is not proper.
The Gist
Crowdsourcing can be a very simple and effective way to get your work done through crowd power without breaking the bank. Do proper homework and post the most accurate and relevant crowdsourcing brief. This will save you plenty of time & money, while getting you a high quality solution at the same time.
