Crowdsourcing is in vogue. This is clearly evident from the number of businesses using it as a business model - Ross Dawson has covered this in Build Your Business With Crowdsourcing  Recently, Iceland was in news for crowdsourcing the drafting of its new constitution to its citizens.

Just a fortnight back we decided to have a new logo for our company – Collabor Inc. We had already crowdsourced our Work2.0 platform logo through www.99designs.com and were happy with the outcome. So we thought why not try the same route again? Here is how it went –

We created the design brief & uploaded it onto the 99design portal hoping to get some exciting logos http://bit.ly/jq7srx. The contest was for 7 days within which we had to short-list our desired logo. For the first three days there was nothing much that excited us but with each feedback we gave the logos got better.  And finally when the D-day arrived we had a mind-boggling 128 designs to choose from.

We shortlisted 4 designs and keeping in with the ‘crowdsourcing spirit’ put it to vote in our company & for the public through Facebook & Twitter. This generated a lot of discussion among the employees & fans on Facebook, resulting in a total of 762 points being awarded. https://www.facebook.com/Collabor.Inc

And this is how we got our new logo - completely crowdsourced in every sense.

 Our observations:

 •Whenever you decide to crowd-source any activity, be very clear in your brief to get the desired result.
 •It is very important to give feedbacks on a regular basis so that the people get a sense of what you are thinking or else one will be left disappointed.
 •Lastly, go the extra mile and rate or vote each of the ideas (designs in our case). It is like giving a    personal opinion to the individuals who have taken the effort to participate which will in turn motivate them to come up with something better.

With 2 successful outcomes it is a thumb-up to crowdsourcing from our side.

So what has been your experience with crowd-sourcing? We would love to hear it.