Crowdsourcing the Future

Trying new things isn’t always easy. PwC learned this firsthand in the spring of 2010 when it launched Canada’s Digital Compass, the firm’s first foray into the innovative world of ‘crowdsourcing’. The campaign, an online competition to get digital enthusiasts to submit ideas to improve Canada’s digital future, was the brainchild of marketing manager Carrie Maynard. She was looking for a way to ignite discussion within the Canadian technology industry about how this country can lead in the digital economy.

“We found that crowdsourcing fit well with what we wanted to accomplish,” says Maynard, “which was to connect with a national audience and talk to people we don’t normally talk to about why Canada wasn’t leading in the digital space.”

Still, launching an online campaign of this magnitude was a radical departure from PwC’s typical marketing efforts. Maynard admits that there were partners and staff who were cautious about the social media campaign even though it aligned with the goals of the firm’s Technology Industry practice. “However, we had a few key champions early on who said, ‘Let’s try this. If we’re talking about digital, then we need to be in the digital space.’ Trying something new like this can be daunting, but it was critical to have these key players embrace change at the same time our clients are faced with the new digital reality.” Even some of the more skeptical team members provided some good input as the campaign began to take shape, she says.

So what is crowdsourcing, anyway?

In a business context, crowdsourcing usually means to ‘outsource’ a task – coming up with a new product or service, for example – to a community of interested people using the online medium. While the term itself was coined by author Jeff Howe in a 2006 article published in Wired magazine, the concept behind it is actually quite old.

“It’s all about the wisdom of crowds,” says Dr. David Jacobson, a director in PwC’s Emerging Technologies practice and the firm’s resident New Media guru. “Crowdsourcing can be an effective way to tap into the tacit knowledge of your customers and potential customers.”

Jacobson says that for a crowdsourcing campaign to succeed, it needs to have a well-thought-out focus. “The broader you make the question you ask, the less likely the campaign is to succeed … When developing your strategy, you must focus on a specific objective and even narrow the focus as the campaign proceeds.”

A real challenge for Maynard was to keep the “ask” of the community specific. Canada’s Digital Compass had a relatively abstract concept at the heart of its question: ‘How do we position Canada to lead in the digital economy?’ To resolve this, she broke the competition up into five subcategories: technology, education, media production, connectivity and policy development. This gave participants something to concentrate their knowledge and enthusiasm on.

“Remember, the fundamental goal is to tap into their tacit knowledge of the subject at hand,” Jacobson says. It’s also important to give them a finite amount of time to complete the crowdsourcing task; a campaign with an open-ended finish line is a lot less likely to succeed. For Canada’s Digital Compass, this meant limiting the initiative to two just months – from the middle of March until the middle of May.

Finally, Jacobson says you really need to plan ahead, get buy-in from your leaders or sponsors, and then focus on execution. “If you do something that doesn’t work, it really shows,” he says. “You need to deal quickly with any issues that come up so that they don’t become the focus and overshadow what the site is trying to achieve.”

So what worked? What didn’t?

Maynard is happy to label Canada’s Digital Compass a success. The website received 1,200 visitors over the course of the initiative, and overall the community submitted 70 ideas for voting. The campaign drew a lot of attention from Canada’s digital community, and there was also a lot of interest internally from PwC staff.

Still, with this sort of “launch and learn” initiative, there is always something to take away for the next time around. Maynard says that if she had the chance to do it again, she would spend even more time on promotion. “People talk of ‘viral’ and word of mouth … but you really got to invest in getting the word out,” she says. “You have to be out there.”

She also would have spent more time defining ‘what’s next?’ now that the initial campaign has wrapped up. She’s not entirely sure yet where Canada’s Digital Compass goes from here. “If we had defined and articulated what our next step is, we’d have eliminated a lot of the questions early on about why we were taking this approach.”

For companies looking to experiment with a crowdsourcing initiative of their own, Jacobson warns not to set unrealistic expectations about what it can accomplish. “It’s not a panacea,” he says. “Crowdsourcing is not a replacement for anything, but an opportunity to tap into the ideas of the collective. In fact, it can make the role of trained professionals in your organization even more critical to success. On its own, crowdsourcing doesn’t solve all problems.”