How do you engage and reward your crowd and open source contributors?

1 Choose the right platform

Depending on your goals, budget, and audience, you may want to use different platforms to host your crowdsourcing and open source projects. GitHub is a great platform for hosting and collaborating on code, documentation, and other digital assets. It offers features like version control, issue tracking, code review, and social networking. Kaggle is a useful platform for data science and machine learning competitions. It provides datasets, notebooks, forums, and leaderboards. InnoCentive can help with hosting and solving complex challenges in various domains such as engineering, health, environment, and social impact. It offers challenge design, evaluation, and rewards features.

2 Define clear and compelling challenges

Motivating people to participate in crowdsourcing and open source projects is largely dependent on the opportunity to work on interesting and meaningful problems. To ensure success, define clear and compelling challenges that align with your objectives and communicate them effectively to your target audience. To do this, make sure they are challenging but not impossible or too vague, relevant to your industry or domain, and appealing to your audience's skills, interests, and values.

3 Provide feedback and support

The engagement and performance of people in crowdsourcing and open source projects are heavily influenced by the feedback they receive from you and their peers. Such feedback can help them improve their skills, learn from their mistakes, and feel appreciated. To provide feedback and support, acknowledge and thank people for their contributions, provide constructive and timely feedback on their submissions, encourage peer feedback, and offer guidance and resources to help them overcome challenges.

4 Recognize and reward contributions

The recognition and reward people receive for their efforts can be another motivational factor. Recognition and reward can make people feel proud and dedicated to your project. To recognize contributions, highlight the best submissions on your website, social media, or other channels. You can also give rewards such as cash prizes, vouchers, certificates, badges, or access to exclusive opportunities or resources. Another way to reward people is to involve them in the decision-making or implementation process of your project through voting, testing, or co-creating solutions. And you can connect participants with potential employers, partners, or mentors who can offer them career or personal development opportunities.

5 Use gamification and socialization elements

Incorporating gamification and socialization elements can make the experience fun and interactive, helping people feel connected to your project and community. Consider using points, badges, leaderboards, challenges, forums, and other forms of communication and collaboration to engage users.

6 Measure and improve your outcomes

Measuring and improving your outcomes can help you evaluate the impact and value of your project, as well as identify the strengths and weaknesses of your process. To do this, define and track key performance indicators, collect and analyze data from participants, test your platform and challenges, and learn from best practices of successful crowdsourcing projects in your field.