Figure 5.1 Coalition Partners Contribute Value by Crowdstorm Process
Prepare to see exclusive Threadless products at GAP stores starting at the end of February!
—Jake Nickell
This is how the founder of Threadless, Jake Nickell, introduced a new partnership with GAP in January 2012.1
For over a decade, Threadless has been an online forum for a community of artists to submit t-shirt designs. Today, the community creates artwork for many more items, from smartphone covers to water bottles. Threadless invites their community to submit designs, often in response to specific themes or challenges. And the community participates in other ways, by voting on submissions and providing feedback as well.
Threadless uses this feedback to select winning designs, reward winners, produce the t-shirts, and sell them via Threadless.com (and their retail store in Chicago). The model has been successful for Threadless. Crowdstorming provides them with a ready stream of fresh ideas and allows them to deliver products with good margins that have been vetted by a creative community. It also provides artists and designers with a great opportunity to make money. Threadless awards cash for the winning designs.
So why would Threadless want to partner with a mainstream retail giant like GAP?
Why? This was the question Jake answered on his blog and in interviews.2 First, partnering was a way for the Threadless community to get more exposure for their work. Threadless presented GAP with about 100 designs for the first run of shirts. While there may have been concerns that Threadless was selling out, every designer they notified agreed to license their work to the GAP. So the partnership provided additional opportunities for more people to see the community’s work (delivering the attention and experience parts of our GAME framework, described in Chapter 4). In fact, artist biographies appeared on the clothing labels, giving the designers even more attention. This was not just a strong signal to the existing community, it also reached prospective participants: If Threadless selects your work, you have an opportunity for visibility and exposure at a scale not easily achieved anywhere else. It sounds a lot like the promise of American Idol. In this way, Threadless is not just making t-shirts and accessories: they are making superstar designers.
For GAP, this presented an effective way to benefit from the results of working with a creative crowd without having to develop many of the capabilities internally. By partnering with Threadless, GAP could bypass most of the processes we are describing in this book while still reaping many of the benefits—including access to talented designers, and an effective filter to help them select the most promising designs. From a branding perspective, GAP also had the opportunity to celebrate the people who make their clothes. For a long time, there was really no connection to the people responsible for designing the clothing in their stores. But the Threadless relationship has allowed GAP to showcase both fresh work as well as the people behind it. The artists’ names and images appeared prominently in GAP stores (and on merchandise) along with the message, “Make Great Together.”
GAP is just one type of partner for Threadless. They have expanded the role of partnerships through The Atrium, which features Threadless collaborations with brands ranging from Disney to the Brain Tumor Foundation. Many of these partnerships go beyond giving people and organizations the ability to distribute more, or gain enhanced fame and recognition. They offer creatives opportunities to be personally inspired by, and contribute to, important brands and missions. This added motivation further encourages great creative work for Threadless, its partners, and the Threadless community.
One way to appreciate the value coalitions provide is to understand how different partners can help in each phase of the crowdstorming process.
For example, Table 5.1 breaks down the GAP + Threadless relationship to show their respective roles in the context of each of the chapters of this book.
Table 5.1 Threadless + Gap Coalition Structure
| Task | Threadless | Gap |
| Ask the right question | “Maybe you feel strongly about protecting the planet. Or maybe you feel strongly about protecting the planet . . . from alien invasion . . . ” —from the first GAP + Threadless brief. Threadless guided the election-themed challenge, understanding their community’s need for creative freedom. | GAP worked with Threadless to develop a challenge-based theme that aligned with their broader store themes. |
| Fair incentives to motivate the crowd | Threadless’s standard incentive is $2,000 in cash and $500 in Threadless gift cards for purchased design. | GAP provided an additional incentive of $10,000 cash award, a $500 GAP gift card, and a $500 Threadless gift certificate to the winning designers. Working with partners like GAP allowed for a much wider distribution of the artists’ designs. Further, the GAP store installations highlighted individual designers and garments, including designer names. The underlying assumption: More distribution equals a more compelling incentive to participate. |
| Build the coalition | This example has a relatively simple coalition of just two parties. But Threadless has experimented with a variety of partnership models over the years—so it is likely that they were able to guide discussions about how GAP should work with the community. | GAP saw the benefit of leveraging the experience Threadless had and was able to increase realized benefits by partnering. |
| Recruit the best participants | Threadless brings their relationships with 1.8 million participants built over 10 years. They understand how to reach large numbers of designers and inspire them to action. | GAP used multiple channels to promote participation, from encouraging voting in stores to promoting opportunities for new submissions. |
| Managing communities to facilitate great outcomes | Threadless took on most of the community management, from explaining the project to designers to helping to make a final selection. | |
| Understanding participant contributions | At part of their platform, Threadless tracks a number of member contributions—from ideas submitted to voting style. | |
| Select the best ideas | Threadless’s platform relies on a voting process to understand what designs are most popular with the community. This has proven to help Threadless sort through about 1,000 submissions each week. First, managers review the top-scoring designs. Then, based on the average score and community feedback, Threadless judges select designs. | GAP provided a judge to work with Threadless to review the ideas based on the public votes, adding an additional layer of filtering against GAP brand guidelines. |
| Choose the right online space | Threadless’s Atrium platform provided the right online environment for this challenge. From voting to messaging, the platform has been successfully used in various incarnations for more than a decade. The space and associated processes are already well known to the Threadless community and easy to understand for newcomers. |
The idea of coalition building is not new. We do this all the time in our various organizations. Internal IT and business departments will partner to tackle problems by combining their respective resources—expertise, needs, networks, and access to funding. Coalitions between different organizations are also common; partnerships to solve intercompany R&D, supply chain, and product development issues are examples where various organizations in the business process perceive benefit from agreeing to improve that process. The partners in these cases each play important functions in setting the objectives, sharing the funding, giving the project credibility, or providing the skills necessary to complete the particular challenge.
In the crowdstorming process, we have noticed some recurring coalition patterns with regard to specific types of organizations and capabilities. In the following sections, we will discuss the types of organizations we find in successful crowdstorming coalition structures.
Recruiting for crowdstorming (which we will look at more closely in the next chapter), looks a lot like what media planners might encounter at an advertising agency. Media planners understand where to find people, who are likely responding to what you are offering from physical space, to their preferred source for morning news. Media Planners understand how to identify the locations with the highest likelihood of having the right people.
So, it should be no surprise that media partnerships are a very common part of coalitions where outreach to external talent as crucial to their success.
Media partners have already aggregated communities of interest—groups of people who are thinking and talking about specific issues. For example, Core77 is a resource for the design community that covers industry-related news, such as award-winning designs and emerging thinking. They regularly discuss design challenges and introduce their community to contests. And they are a resource for designers in other ways, such as hosting their portfolios and connecting them with new job opportunities.
But an organization like Core77 can do more than directly support recruiting. Their brand is well respected; therefore, an opportunity to have one’s work featured in their selective news coverage is highly desirable. In this way, Core77 lends a hand in making good on the promise of attention. They have repeatedly demonstrated that they will promote the best designs from crowdstorming challenges; these selections represent the “content” that their community wants to see, while giving the winning designers the visibility and attention they desire.
Core77 is just one specialty media partner. Nowadays, specialty communities cover everything from sustainable energy and resource management to data visualization. Having these media partners as part of a crowdstorming coalition can be essential to attracting the right participants.
Known experts can play a number of important roles throughout the crowdstorm process. Domain experts, for instance, provide excellent sparring partners when creating the call to action and their personal brands can underscore a particular initiative’s importance as well as commitment to expert evaluation. Involving a well-known professor, technology evangelist, or “rock star” designer affords social proof of a challenge’s importance and integrity. Much like a celebrity endorsement, participation of known experts tells people that they can likely trust the organizers of a particular crowdstorming project to deliver on their promises.
Experts play another important role. There are often challenges that have feedback as a key component of the crowdstorm process. Also, final evaluation will often require some expert and subjective consideration in order to select a winner. Getting these experts involved signals that the process will not only be fair but will also include feedback from an industry or topic specialist. Experts provide very practical support through the evaluation process that also tweaks participant interest. Getting feedback from known experts is powerful motivation to participate. (We will look in more detail at how this plays out in Chapter 9, where we discuss the process of evaluating and selecting the best ideas.)
As we discussed in the last chapter, financial incentives are a necessary component of crowdstorming. We mentioned cash, acquisition, and funding alternatives—all of which can receive a boost with partners.
GE Ecomagination is a case in point. The company provided strong monetary incentives, and the additional financial options that GE’s well-known and respected venture capital coalition partners offered made the challenge very compelling. In addition, GE benefited from their coalition partners’ expertise in early-stage investments.
At the end of Chapter 4, we also discussed Quirky (the industrial design company that uses crowdstorming to create new products). As part of their process, they have been building coalition relationships with partners, one of whom is retail powerhouse Target. Quirky’s model can help to paint a clear picture of a variant on financial underwriting partnerships.
Participants in Quirky’s design and development process earn a share of the brand’s product revenue. Partnering with Target, with their 1,767 US stores, allowed Quirky and their external design community to greatly expand their marketing and distribution network and therefore unit sales, a critical component of the revenue sharing model.
While Target might not be a financial underwriter for Quirky in the way that GE’s venture investors were, access to Target’s distribution and marketing enables higher financial upside for Quirky and its participants. It’s yet another win-win.
So far, the benefits of building a coalition have focused on three primary areas: developing the call to action, incentives, and recruiting. These are all essential factors in launching the crowdstorming process. However, partners play a critical role in making everything work—specifically, by providing the right technical space and community organizing skills.
While we haven’t yet discussed online spaces (we do this in Chapter 10), we know that organizations need technology platforms to make online work environments function. Specifically, they are necessary in order to enable the processes and community management that will organize the work. It is important to understand that most organizations, as they begin the crowdstorming processes, will benefit from finding partners who cover one or both of these objectives.
In fact, there are a number of organizations begun in the past 10 years that have experience in these areas. We have already met some of them: LEGO Cuusoo, Quirky, Threadless (GAP), jovoto (LifeEdited, Starbucks Betacup), Brightidea (GE Ecomagination), and InnoCentive are just a few examples of groups that that have built spaces and organizational processes to drive successful crowdstorming projects. We will meet more as we continue.
We will talk a lot more about crowdstorm patterns, community management, and online spaces, but for now it is worth noting that these types of partners can be valuable to your crowdstorm coalition.
After the crowdstorming process, you are left with ideas that could range from concepts to patents—it is less usual to have a team that will also be able to realize or produce their idea. Whatever their stage of development, they will need help to become real. And it is very easy to underestimate the risk and challenges that emerge just when you think you have reached the end.
In many cases, such as Threadless or LEGO, your organization might be responsible for production. In other cases, you might frame a problem in a way that makes the participants responsible for production—such as GE Ecomagination or Sequoia Capital. Later in this chapter, we will talk more about how LifeEdited benefited from production partners. Similarly, Quirky includes specific steps in their crowdstorming process to review ideas with production partners—another way they give ideas a higher likelihood of being realized.
As you can see, the benefits that partners offer depend a great deal on your organization. We typically see smaller organizations making more use of partnerships, while larger firms can do more internally or with existing partner relationships.
Figure 5.1 provides a review of the opportunities for coalition building in the context of each of the book chapters. It provides a rough guide to what types of partners can be most helpful during specific parts of the crowdstorm process. The size of the bars suggests the partner’s ability to contribute during a particular phase. It should help you imagine some possible collaborators as you conclude each chapter.
Figure 5.1 Coalition Partners Contribute Value by Crowdstorm Process
These are the tasks and roles by function that you need to consider. Keeping this structure in mind, let’s look at a couple of the case studies we have discussed thus far to demonstrate some of the ways organizations have worked together to build coalitions to enhance their crowdstorming challenge. We will also evaluate how each partner derived value from participating.
The goal of LifeEdited was to design an urban living space that would give people “more money, health, and happiness with less stuff, space, and energy.” The goal was not only to tap into external talent to get ideas, but to help launch a new company, LifeEdited. Graham Hill, the founder of LifeEdited, needed to achieve the tasks of promoting a newly created brand, attracting expert external talent, funding the project, and managing and executing the project.
Graham Hill had two goals: to find great ideas for the design challenge, and to launch LifeEdited by raising awareness about low-footprint living. Activating TreeHugger, Architizer, and Core77 to help recruit the right participants and leverage the challenge’s content for promotion provided huge visibility for LifeEdited—specifically, over 15 million media impressions during the challenge. It also provided these sites with a focused forum for their members to work on a challenge that was meaningful to them and took advantage of their capabilities. As a large corporation, Cisco’s sponsorship provided additional credibility for the challenge. Cisco benefitted as well: the challenge helped highlight the ways in which technology might help to reduce our footprint by enabling us to work remotely and live with more of our content available online versus physical media taking up space in our homes.
Partnering with companies like jovoto and Mutopo, who brought the space, community and expertise to deliver crowdstorming projects, provided LifeEdited with a complete solution. Jovoto and Mutopo benefitted by receiving fees for services—and gave jovoto’s creative community the chance to work on a meaningful project. Outside jury members provided attention to participants and brought expertise to evaluating the results.
Graham built a coalition to deliver on this. Table 5.2 is what the partnering and sponsorship looked like.
Table 5.2 The Large LifeEdited Coalition
When GE launched its $200 million Ecomagination project, they invited innovators to submit their best ideas for new and better ways to create, capture, manage, or use energy, they were looking for two things: breakthrough thinking and talent. They recognized that despite the incentives their brand could provide—GE’s capabilities such as distribution, brand, and capital—they needed more. So, they invited premier venture capital funds Emerald Technology Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Rockport Capital to participate. In addition, they needed to team with an organization that could provide the right online space to host the challenge. This was where the technology provider, Brightidea, came in. Table 5.3 shows what their coalition looked like.
Table 5.3 GE Ecomagination Coalition
GE’s vision of reaching out to global entrepreneurs prompted them to select 22 ideas for development to meet their goal of finding new power grid technologies for the twenty-first century. But there was much for the coalition partners, too. It allowed the participating venture capital funds to quickly access and review over 4,000. As a proven technology to support the execution of an open challenge, Brightidea delivered a turnkey solution to GE. In exchange, the opportunity they received to work with GE brought enormous credibility to Brightidea’s platform and approach to large-scale crowdstorm processes.
Each coalition participant will provide value in some way in order to receive value in another. This does not always mean paying for services. There are other ways in which participants can receive value—which can dramatically affect your budget while improving your crowdstorming process’s effectiveness.
Let’s look again at our key roles to understand some of the main sources of value for the coalition participants.
Beyond the specific coalition roles we have discussed, working with partners provides a great opportunity to learn, while reducing investments and risks. For this reason alone, it is worth considering partners as you plan your crowdstorm process.
Notes
1. Jeff Howe, “The Rise of Crowdsourcing,” Wired (June 2006), www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/crowds.html.
2. Jake Nickell, “What Do Threadless Partnerships Mean for Artists??? Update: Gap Is Live!” Threadless Blog, www.threadless.com/profile/1/skaw/blog/792937/What_do_Threadless_partnerships_mean_for_artists.