How To Find the Right Crowdsourcing Platform for Your Next Creative Endeavor

Crowdsourcing platforms are all the buzz these days. It makes sense, they’re not only a great tool to empower individuals and communities to come together, share their expertise, and collectively drive innovation, but they’re also fast becoming a go-to resource for individuals and brands of all sizes to tap into new creative thinkers, and diversify their vendor pool.

But, there’s a lot out there to navigate! So to help, we put together a few tips to help you optimize your search and utilize these crowdsourcing platforms to their fullest potential.

Understanding Crowdsourcing

Before we delve into the specifics, let's clarify what crowdsourcing entails. Crowdsourcing is a process that involves seeking input, ideas, or content from a large and diverse group of people, typically from the public or an online community. But in reality, it’s evolved to become a go-to resource to tap into new talent not in your day-to-day community.

You can literally crowdsource anything these days. So, the trick is to start at the baseline - what is it you’re wanting to create with the crowd?

1. Identify your creative need

There are tons of crowdsourcing platforms out there, covering everything from business innovation ideas, funding, and all things creative. So before you start diving down the rabbit hole, make sure to understand what exactly you’re trying to accomplish.

If it’s a design based initiative, 99Designs and DesignCrowd are two of the favorites these days to get a logo or any brand work knocked out. If it’s video based, tools like Cinebody can help you streamline and aggregate the footage you capture from your chosen crowd. Or, you can go the route of tapping into an influencer network to get content (and even distribution) from select influencers - warning, it can be pricey!

If it’s a more robust request, look at freelance-specific crowdsourcing platforms like Upwork. There, you can find a wealth of global freelancers of all shapes and sizes to pretty much tackle whatever creative endeavor you have on the docket…especially if you have an exact idea of what you’re needing.

2. Assess the level of effort

Once your creative need is identified, you're off to the races. And if it’s a specific request like a logo or video project, then the previous noted platforms can do the trick. But, if your idea is still loose and needs some refinement, there’s more involved crowdsourcing platforms that you can choose.

Tongal is a great resource for this (especially when it comes to video). Brands sign up and work with the organization to develop a creative brief that goes out to their army of creators. From there, they receive pitches and can select the vendor to work with to create a larger production or even a series.

3. Join a community

Crowdsouring platforms aren’t just limited to executing a creative project, they can also be used to access new information, trends, or even get help connecting with resources for future projects. Reddit is basically a crowdsourcing platform for user input on a wide range of topics, as well as Quora.

For example, the video production community WheresSpot is an unbelievable community resource. It’s a huge, managed network of filmmakers and production crew all across the globe. If any user has a need for an on-set project, they can put a call out and immediately get connected to a local resource. It’s truly the power of the community to benefit everyone, and getting involved in these types of networks not only gives you an advantage on your creative endeavors, but also strengthens the power of the individual networks.

So there you have it, three distinct ways to explore crowdsourcing platforms to knock out your next creative endeavors. There’s a lot out there to explore. Good luck!