Chapter 6

Recruit the Best Participants

You’re only as good as the people you hire.

—Ray Kroc

When we think about recruiting, we instinctively focus on who might have the expertise to submit a response to solve our problem. But when we take this approach, we miss an important opportunity to let valuable talent participate in smaller but still useful ways like rating a solution or offering feedback. Like supporting roles in a movie, these roles are easy to overlook; but movies would not work without them.

We have identified three crowdstorm patterns to reflect different roles so we can better understand who we might recruit and what we will expect them to do. For the moment we are just focused on recruiting, but we will continue to revisit these patterns as they impact many aspects of the crowdstorm process: from measuring contributions enabling fair reward to managing much larger numbers of contributors when we look to add more supporting roles.

We will refer back to the patterns in Figure 6.1 throughout the rest of the book.

Figure 6.1 Crowdstorming Interactive Patterns

The patterns reflect roles and interactions between the people who are both inside and outside an organization. As more roles are added, the number of participants and interactions rises sharply. The key attributes of these patterns are as follows:

• Search: The focus is finding and recruiting domain experts from outside the organization (for example, this might be outside your team or outside your company). Outside, or external, talent is asked to submit ideas based on their expertise to solve the problem. There is limited interaction between those submitting the ideas—they do not share ideas or feedback. Experts, primarily from inside the organization, decide on the best ideas.
• Collaboration: Participants are recruited not only for their ability to submit ideas, but also for other supporting roles, such as providing feedback and evaluating ideas. There is interaction between participants—they share ideas, feedback, and evaluations of work. Those managing the challenge—community managers—encourage and support this interaction. For this pattern, recruiting focuses not only on finding domain expertise, but also on finding participants who can provide feedback and filtering based on their capabilities and time constraints.
• Integration: Integration builds on the collaboration pattern. Organizations use this pattern to incorporate crowdstorming into their business operations. As a result, they expand the number of processes involved (for example, idea creation, prototyping, production). Recruiting therefore involves a greater focus on finding inside as well as outside talent.

Let’s look at the implications of each of the patterns a little more closely to see how they impact recruiting.

Finding the Person Who Will Find Your Problem Trivial

Recruiting for domain knowledge is the sole focus of the search pattern.

When we put together traditional teams, we are usually seeking a core group to generate something—a concept, a prototype, a plan, or new business. Therefore, uncovering a domain expert is usually the primary focus.

As organizations have called upon larger groups of participants to solve problems using crowdstorming, they’ve made some interesting discoveries with respect to domain expertise. While expertise, of course, remains critical, increasingly, people from outside the task domain have actually solved many problems.

Recruiting for key contributors becomes not only a hunt for sameness (this may include more experts or specialists from outside), but also a call for likeness that can be applied. Let’s look at an example from the P&G Connect and Develop project to illustrate this concept.

Over the past few years, the San Diego Zoo has been developing a specialty in biomimicry, a discipline that tries to solve problems by imitating the ingenious and sustainable answers that nature provides. Writers Dan and Chet Heath describe how P&G leveraged talent from a different but like discipline to solve a problem:

Let’s say you’re looking to create a detergent that works superbly in cold temperatures. This would seem to be a chemical engineering problem. But, as the zoo’s scientists tell us, it’s also an Antarctic icefish problem. When the icefish eats other fish, it has to digest [its prey’s] oils—[a] process [that’s] remarkably similar to what happens in the wash with the oily taco stains on your T-shirt. Furthermore, the icefish typically dines in water as cold as minus 2 degrees Celsius. (Try that, All-Temperature Cheer!) So, thanks to this cold fish, you have a working model for an ultra-low-temperature detergent—and it’s a solution that would have never occurred to an expert.1

P&G found that the goal was to uncover “that elusive person who’d find your problem trivial.” Their search wasn’t random or arbitrary; at the same time they wanted to cast a net wide enough to find resources that could deliver the unexpected solution. A crowdstorming environment, in fact, lends itself to helping companies find analogous solutions and resources by the mere fact of being open to participants who see the opportunity of applying solutions they have worked on in new ways.

Recruiting for domain knowledge then entails finding participants with expert knowledge, as well as those who have the advantage of not being burdened with assumptions—individuals who can bring new perspectives and heuristics to solve a given problem. We will discuss where and how to find these people later in the chapter.

But before we go there, let’s look at the other interactive patterns to see what other potentially new roles organizations need to consider when recruiting.

Recruiting for Supporting Roles

Beyond the core contributors there are also supporting roles. These participants have an interest in the outcome and spend some time injecting comments, critiques, and inspiration in response to a submitted idea, in addition to offering evaluation. They differ from core participants primarily based on the amount of time they are willing or able to commit to the challenge. Since they’re commenting, editing, and evaluating rather than creating, their time commitment is often lower—despite their passion or knowledge. Yet, depending on how you structure the challenge, their contribution is critical.

These roles take shape based on the amount of time invested. For instance, you expect traditional core team members to contribute 10 hours per week. Crowdstorming environments make it feasible to recruit team members who contribute, for example, 1 hour per week on much smaller tasks like voting, sharing, or commenting.

In fact, Dennis Wilkinson, of HP’s Social Computing Lab,2 looked at various participation opportunities across a number of different online communities. He found a recurring pattern, independent of the domain of expertise. There is a long tail—a small number of contributions from a few who do the work (idea submitters) and a lot of contributions from those who support the work (provide feedback and filtering). The HP research showed participation on simple tasks like voting was much higher than participation on tasks like commenting—a task requiring more time. And participation on commenting tasks was much higher than idea creation—the most intensive task.

Where Are the Crowds?

This leads us to a discussion about where talent can be found. There are three basic places to tap: employees within an organization; existing communities based on skills, domain knowledge, professional interests/affiliation, and other criteria; and the public.

• Employees: An organization may choose to recruit its own employees to participate in a crowdstorm project. This means looking beyond the organization’s traditional functional, geographical, and hierarchical boundaries.
• Existing Communities: We have already talked about some of these communites like Threadless, jovoto or InnoCentive. These communities are organized with crowdstorm processes in mind. But many, many more communities exist for everything from sharing knowledge to finding new work opportunities. It is easy to forget that universities already organize groups of people around interests and expertise, too. Researchers and students are often participants in crowdstom processes. Increasingly, traditional media planning approaches enable the identification of groups organized around everything from blogs to LinkedIn Groups.
• The Public: Finally, there are times when an open call is valuable to discover people who might not be affiliated with specific communities. In much the same way as we use numerous channels to market to prospective customers using everything from search keywords to psychographics, so too we can find people who might be interested in our specific challenge.

Once we know where we might find prospective participants, we need to set about convincing them to join our crowdstorming initiatives.

The Participant Journey

We focus so much of our marketing efforts today on selling—on moving people through an experience to arrive at a point where they want to purchase something. Since crowdstorming requires that we sell people on an experience, we can learn from these successful marketing approaches. Our aim is not to rewrite the book on marketing tactics, but simply to emphasize a few critical steps in the participant journey.

You may recall that we introduced this in Chapter 2 as a way to understand how trust and information exchange can grow, as participants move from awareness to making the decision to participate in a challenge. The participant journey also highlights critical decisions for participation during the recruiting process.

Figure 6.2 highlights the critical points on the participant journey:

Figure 6.2 The Participant Journey—Recruiting

• Awareness is the starting point for the participant journey. We want to generate interest and call people to action. This begins with the call to action and the brief.

Once a description of the challenge is in place there are various channels available to get your call out. GE’s Ecomagination Challenge tied into a broader marketing effort, whereas XPrize Tricorder benefitted from an awareness of a fictional device popularized in Star Trek. But not everyone can tap into a global marketing campaign or media phenomenon.

LifeEdited concentrated instead on targeting messages to specific communities of interest with media partners like Core77 (design), TreeHugger (sustainability), and Architizer (architecture). InnoCentive works with media partners like The Economist or Popular Mechanics in a similar way to ensure their briefs are introduced and channeled to communities with the domain knowledge to work on the challenges. Startups like Quirky and Threadless make use of product success stories to earn media, highlighting how they and their communities are succeeding.

As we highlighted in Chapter 5, recruiting is one of the reasons that Media Partners are so often part of crowdstorm coalitions.

• Consideration is the next major step. The call to action and briefs generates interest through awareness. Incentives, on the other hand, are at the core of determining how participants will consider participating. How people feel about the incentives helps them evaluate whether or not the effort can result in meaningful payoffs. Participants will also try to understand the likelihood that promises will be delivered—strong brands benefit tremendously from this, but startup brands like Threadless and Quirky have established a track record of consistent, fair results to give a high level of comfort to prospective participants.
• Participation is the point at which people will confirm taking on a specific role. The threshold for committing to submit ideas is high so we usually expect fairly low conversion rates from consideration to participation. Less than 1 percent of participants are likely to submit ideas or proposals. The many additional roles for the collaboration and integration patterns bring participation rates up to 10 percent. That is, many more people can and will take on supporting roles.
• Experience. Gaining experience is an important incentive driving participation. The better the experience on the platform—support, exposure, learning access to experts—the longer participants will stay; in addition, it is more likely that they will help recruit more people if the experience is good—not unlike the way people behave with products and services they purchase or employers they like. Think back to our discussion of new Wikipedia editors: if participants don’t have a positive experience, they will leave—meaning that much of our prior effort in awareness, consideration, and designing participation will have been for naught. If participants have a successful experience, they are likely to advocate for the community and recruit others to the community; if they have a negative experience, they will negatively influence participation.

Recruiting Tactics for Specific Crowds

We’ve looked at the participant journey in general, but it is worth highlighting a few aspects of the journey (and therefore tactics) that might help with recruiting for specific crowds.

• Tactics for Employees: Talking to employees about crowdstorm participation means you are asking people to participate in a new organizational structure—to take on work beyond their current responsibilities. Recruiting necessitates that as you build awareness, you also contemplate how the crowdstorm process will work alongside what people are already doing. Later in the chapter, we will show how CEMEX initially recruited small groups to show what might be possible and made it ok for more people to join in.
• Tactics for external communities and the public: We highlighted the importance of identifying specific existing communities you want to invite directly (for example, universities or specific groups interested in the problem space). This is a function of research, leveraging personal and professional networks, as well as identifying partners who can become part of a challenge coalition and exploiting their networks. There are several mechanisms for reaching communities: creating a new site to show the brief—this could include videos along with other material to market and broadcast the challenge—and working with media partners to use the brief and content to generate interest.

Getting participants to consider whether to participate is initially a function of how well those running the challenge communicate the brief, and what the incentives are to participate. Even more interesting is how participants contribute to recruiting during the process. Platforms that allow participants to share work and engage their own personal networks during a crowdstorm will help fuel the recruiting process by providing positive feedback

Organizations need to build the appropriate tactics into their recruiting strategy in order to find participants for the roles they need based on the crowdsourcing interactive patterns they elect to use.

Let’s look at a few examples of organizations that have done this successfully.

CEMEX—Recruiting Employees

Our first example is a company that recruited its own employees, and that faced challenges in all three recruiting steps. Employees had to become aware of a fundamental new way of doing innovation; they had to be convinced that it was valuable to participate, and a process and platform had to be implemented that could make participation credible for people who did not know each other.

It is unlikely you have heard of CEMEX if you work outside the construction business. However, you have very likely benefitted from their products. CEMEX is one of the leading global building materials companies. They trade in more than 100 countries and have close to 47,000 employees located around the world.

In 2010, CEMEX set out to deploy SHIFT, a new platform to encourage idea sharing across the company. Their aim was to encourage collaboration to drive innovation—specifically, to develop new products and reduce time to market. To do this, they had to move from relatively independent global operations to becoming a more tightly integrated global company, and they needed to recruit platform participants from across their employee pool.

CEMEX had to figure out how to encourage adoption of crowdstorming in order to share ideas in an interactive way across multiple cultures, languages, and modes of problem solving. They answered this challenge, and went from a core group of 2,000 people in April 2010 to over 13,000 active users by February 2012.3 They did this by following some of the approaches we have discussed thus far.

• Awareness: They defined the roles for which they were recruiting and tailored a communications agenda. The goal of this agenda was to create awareness and define the norms for engagement—as well as to convince internal talent to participate. CEMEX identified an innovation team to set up the approach to crowdstorming. The team then brought together 400 members who identified the strategic topics upon which the company needed to focus—and, importantly, they used the new crowdstorming processes and technology to do it. This was a departure from the top-down hierarchical approach CEMEX had traditionally used, which signaled to the rest of the company that management was serious.
• Consideration: Next, the innovation team and the new collaborative community leaders identified the profiles that matched the challenge’s needs. They identified champions in the required areas, trained them, and asked them to become the spokespeople for the challenge. As such, their job was to communicate the value of crowdstorming to others in an attempt to put them at ease with using the new processes and technology. Finally, they offered an open invitation to employees to join. CEMEX learned how to better assemble and engage work groups simply by inviting people, instead of conscripting them to communities or teams.
• Participation: Once they completed this stage, they held a series of on-boarding sessions—they invested the time to ensure that people could take the first important steps to get comfortable with the new tools and processes. The innovation team provided an easy-to-use help center that included videos and brief tutorials on topics of interest. They also executed a strong internal communication campaign to enforce messages with coaching and training. The community management team leveraged the initial 400 contributors to advocate for the platform by sharing their experience. They made ideas and feedback visible to all, and encouraged the sharing of knowledge and experience. CEMEX also realized that by bringing existing communities into the new space—for example, a community that already existed to develop special products for the Ready Mix Concrete group—they could bring in domain experts and influence behavior that would be immediately impactful and enrich the ideas and norms that existed on the platform.
• Experience: Advocating using success stories: Success stories demonstrated to others the tangible benefits of participation. “Encouraging more participation in social networking among those who remain skeptical is still a challenge, but CEMEX found that they can achieve more positive results by showing the tangible benefits of changing the way to work. Success stories are thus the bread and butter of the ongoing mobilization effort, breaking down barriers and getting people to try new things out.” CEMEX saw that participants were pushing these success stories. “Today, we see a marked increase in blogs, and blog comments, as well as in the creation of more than 500 communities to bring people with common interests and goals together. Wikis and discussion forums are being used in each of these communities as a means to solve local problems with global talent and to store and share the knowledge they are generating.”4

For CEMEX, the transition to internal crowdstorming was a success story based, in part, on how they handled the recruiting process. They changed their innovation culture from hierarchical to engaging talent from far and wide by using tactics to build awareness and consideration—then communicating the value of the participant’s experience.

LEGO—Beyond Domain Knowledge

In Chapter 1, we introduced examples of how LEGO puts crowdstorm processes to work. Their most recent efforts are focused on getting help to identify the most promising new LEGO designs using the LEGO Cuusoo platform. While they have an active fan base, their fans are distributed across multiple interest groups. LEGO needed a way for them to share and respond to ideas in one place to better organize interactions.

Here is how they did it:

• Awareness: They reached out to existing fan communities. The recruiting strategy LEGO used to deliver innovative products with a good return on investment using external resources has evolved over time. When they first realized they were in trouble—and management became aware that they could leverage their fans to help their internal team’s product development efforts—their initial outreach was limited. They sent out a request at one of the toy fairs asking if 100 enthusiasts would be interested in helping them. They received an overwhelming response—so overwhelming that they had to reorganize themselves internally to deal with it. They realized that they had to put a few systems in place. They needed to structure themselves to ask an external audience the right questions; provide the mechanisms to capture and manage idea, insight, and evaluation input from an external audience; and inplement them appropriately. This would allow them to enjoy a significant increase in their product pipeline. LEGO also realized something very interesting from a recruiting standpoint: creating Cuusoo allowed them to build awareness by broadcasting their challenge more effectively to a wider range of participants. They let their existing fans—an external community of consumers and designers with an interest in, and knowledge of, their products—know that there was a forum for idea creation. But they did more.
• Consideration: When LEGO introduced Cuusoo, it was only available in Japan. The first idea took 422 days to meet an initially low threshold of 1,000 votes. While slow, this initial investment showed that LEGO was serious about moving ideas from Cuusoo into stores (with credit going to idea submitters). Fans then began to consider the platform seriously, as a way to have their LEGO wishes realized.
• Experience: Participants could share their experience at multiple levels. Those who found ideas that they loved and wanted to support could easily share and encourage other people to support their ideas. In doing this, participants not only made others aware of the specific idea, but also of the existence of the Cuusoo platform and associated opportunities. Similarly, as participants began to win, they discussed their experiences—in the case of LEGO Minecraft, the Cuusoo platform received significant media coverage. The Minecraft community had grown around the successful independent computer game. When the community decided to propose a LEGO idea based on the game, it received the necessary 10,000 votes within 45 hours and soon made it through the design phase and into production. The media coverage highlighted the positive experience of the various participants.

DARPA—Testing Recruiting Strategies

If you invented the Internet, how would you celebrate its fortieth birthday? For the United States Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), the answer was simple—let’s see what this baby can do. In Chapter 3, we talked about DARPA’s experience in using open calls and contest structures to get new results and learning. But on the fortieth birthday of the Internet, DARPA outdid itself and in the process provided us all with a very useful head-to-head comparison of different recruiting strategies for online collaboration.

The agency wanted to understand how they could use the latest generation of online technologies and behaviors to solve broad scope, time-critical problems. While this book is focused on a specific type of problem related to quickly finding the best ideas and talent, DARPA took a broad view on what they were seeking—and, as a stand-in for their research agenda, they turned to weather balloons.

On a Saturday in December in 2009, the agency released 10 red weather balloons across the continental United States and then waited to discover if and how teams would be able to locate them. In the end, over 4,000 teams participated.

Here is how DARPA posed the challenge:

To mark the fortieth anniversary of the Internet, DARPA has announced the DARPA Network Challenge, a competition that will explore the roles the Internet and social networking play in the timely communication, wide-area team-building, and urgent mobilization required to solve broad-scope, time-critical problems. The challenge is to be the first to submit the locations of 10 moored, eight-foot, red, weather balloons at 10 fixed locations in the continental United States. The balloons will be in readily accessible locations and visible from nearby roads.5

The prize for the winning team was $40,000.

The DARPA team already sensed that Internet tools and connections were enabling new ways to find and organize talent. They wanted to create a challenge that would demonstrate how people could do this on a grand scale. To date, this remains one of the largest scale head-to-head tests of different online crowd recruiting strategies that we have been able to find.

DARPA discovered, via the interviews they conducted following the challenge, that the most successful responses employed a number of similar approaches. The winning team, a group of MIT students, employed a recursive strategy for recruiting; that is, people who joined the team were rewarded not just for finding balloons but also for finding people who found the balloons. This team devised incentives that motivated people to forward to others its message about the challenge and the need for help. They promised $2,000 to the first person who submitted the correct coordinates for a single balloon, and $1,000 to the person who invited that person to the challenge. Another $500 would go to the person who invited the inviter, and so on. The system quickly took root, spawning geographically broad, dense branches of connections.

After 8 hours and 52 minutes, the MIT team identified the correct coordinates for all 10 balloons, doling out prize money to people in the winning recruiting chains and donating the rest to charity.

This outcome is worth reflecting on for two reasons. First, as we discussed at the beginning of this chapter, our instinct is to focus recruiting on those people who are likely to submit responses to our brief. But it is easy to forget that there are other roles that might be useful to us. For example, what is the value of the people who might introduce us to the people with ideas or IP?

The second important aspect is related to the media. There were many ways for people to discover the DARPA challenge. Stories about it were featured by organizations able to reach large number of readers or viewers, like the New York Times and CNN. And, if you searched online for the challenge, you would also find multiple teams trying to recruit you to their cause.

The winning team—as well as many of the other successful teams—was smart enough to realize that while many people might not be able to find the balloon, they might still be able to respond to the media coverage and play a useful role. If, for instance, you found your way to the MIT site, you could participate not only by finding the balloon but also by finding more people who could find the balloons—and you would still stand a chance of benefitting.

A final comment on the use of media in this DARPA challenge: many of the teams employed strategies that would look very familiar to any senior marketer today. They made use of broadcast media; however, they did not pay for media but earned it by offering interesting stories and incentives—all familiar, efficient awareness strategies.

DARPA tracked contest site traffic to understand rapidly increasing interest, and then tracked teams as they launched their various recruiting websites. Many of the teams used their recruiting sites in conjunction with search advertising or search engine optimization to get people to join their teams. Still others made use of their social networks, as conversations on Facebook and Twitter trended toward the Network Challenge in the days running up the launch. The broadcast phase proved useful to many teams in helping to build awareness and consideration.

The Right Participants and Interactions

Recruiting the desired participants for your crowdstorm is a function of various elements: finding talent with the domain knowledge needed to solve your task; accessing talent with like knowledge from another domain that could solve your problem; and optimizing participation from talent who may not be able to devote the time to create ideas, but who can provide feedback on and help you filter ideas. Understanding the type of roles you want for your challenge—as well as the type of interaction that works best for your community—is crucial when choosing your recruiting strategy. In addition, it is critical to develop tactics to deal with the key touch points along the participant journey—awareness, consideration, participation, and experience.

Managing and monitoring the participant’s experience during crowdstorming is not only important for recruiting. It can also help improve the outcome of challenges, the experience, and then the resulting advocacy.

We now turn our attention to how you manage and monitor participation to deliver the best results.

Notes

1. Dan & Chet Heath, “A Problem-Solver’s Guide to Copycatting,” Fast Company (November 1, 2009), www.fastcompany.com/1400929/problem-solvers-guide-copycatting.

2. Dennis W. Wilkinson, “Strong Regularities in Online Peer Production,” Social Computing Lab, HP Labs, www.hpl.hp.com/research/scl/papers/regularities/regularities.pdf.

3. For details on CEMEX see Jesus Gilberto Garcia, “Shift Changes the Way Cemex Works,” Management Innovation Exchange (September 2, 2011), www.managementexchange.com/story/shift-changes-way-cemex-works.

4. Ibid.

5. Darpa Challenge archives, archive.darpa.mil/networkchallenge.