Crowdsourcing is a household name in the corporate industry. It involves the use of a group of people to deliver services. There are no specific disciplines that we will say that need crowdsourcing. Every corporate entity can still make good use of this service. With the advent of digital technology, this has been a good way to save on costs since people opt to outsource for services. They now run away from paying taxes, employee benefits like pension and all other benefits that come with permanent staff. Instead, they wish to outsource to companies to provide a specific service. In this article, we will look at how’s in crowdsourcing.
How can crowd outsourcing be of benefit to your company?
Helps to solve problems
As a leader or a director of a corporate organization, you are expected to provide solutions to the simple and even complex problems. You are human who is only limited with knowledge yet everyone looks upon you for business solutions. This is the role of crowdsourcing. You involve so many people to come to your id to give you different approaches to business techniques. They brainstorm on the issue such that the decision that they now make definitely will be of benefit to the company. You may find that you have a wise leader but he has just made good use of crowdsourcing facilities available in the market.
Offers diverse thoughts
The moment you bring many people together then be sure that you have diverse thoughts that will be of benefit to the company. When you have tough problems that you need to get people to help you solve them then this is the service that you now need. How is this possible, you will have people with experience, wisdom, thoughts, contents, and expertise to make sure that you get the best out of the situation.
Offloads the burden
In leadership, they say that the small problems you leave for the junior while you focus on bigger problems. You cannot carry all the burden to yourself. Crowdsourcing gives you the chance to give the burden to other people to sort it out for you. It makes sure that you have all the ideas for you to choose the best that is of help to your company.
It is a marketing strategy
What is marketing? It is a way in which you make sure that people get to know about the services that you offer. People will tend to refer people to what they have known and they have worked with. Remember you are now dealing with different people in the quest knowledge, obviously, you are now disseminating information to different people for the benefit of spreading the word.
With all these efforts, you are sure that an issue that you could have taken weeks or even months to get a solution you now get it in a matter of days since you now involve many people to handle it for you. In short, it is a way of delegating duties to different people to make work faster and easier for you.
Crowdsourcing, otherwise called crowdfunding, is rapidly gaining momentum among many individuals, organizations, and agencies to provide various services. The crowdsourcing approach is about the acquisition of ideas and services from a broad range of people, mostly the online communities, instead of the conventional local employees or suppliers. And there are many outstanding results from the collaboration of a wide range of multiple professionals. An example of such outcomes is the manufacture of a machinery system that helps protect you from unfavorable environmental conditions.
Cybersecurity, on the other hand, is a basic necessity you should consider ensuring. In this digital age, we perform various activities online using digital devices, which necessitates the need for cybersecurity. Cybercrime is a robust economic growth inhibitor and a negative catalyst to general progress and development. Somewhere now, as you read this article, some malicious individual is developing malware to cause online havoc to careless users.
However, you can be on the defense side with the use of crowdsourcing. It would be best if you considered trusting crowdsourcing enough as a successful solution to protect your digital system, thereby ensuring maximum cybersecurity. Here are six other reasons you should consider the crowdsourcing approach for your cybersecurity.
Access to Diverse Inputs
A tree, they say, doesn’t make a forest. Crowdsourcing is a remarkable initiative that affords you access to diverse and multifaceted inputs from many professional experts in the world of cybersecurity. Engaging in crowdsourcing will enable you to use the best services to protect your digital engagements, unlike the usual passive inputs from local employees.
Scarcity of Human Resources
In this digital age, whether as a private individual, private and public organization, or government agency, you undoubtedly make use of the internet as a platform for carrying out many crucial activities. And there is a need for more cyber experts due to the staggering daily increase in cybercrimes and digital exploitations.
Unfortunately, there’s an impactful shortage of cyber experts and professionals in many organizations today. Importing cybergeeks or neglecting to protect your digital interactions won’t do any good. Likewise, insourcing doesn’t completely protect you from online manipulations, and neglection will only worsen your vulnerability to cyberattacks.
Crowdsourcing, therefore, is the only appropriate solution that will fill this gap of cybersecurity deficit. When you utilize the crowdsourcing approach, you’d have access to specialized skills from the top and experienced cyber professionals worldwide. You wouldn’t have to worry about the scarcity of professional cyber experts.
Boost Your Reputation
Especially as an organization, crowdsourcing will largely boost your reputation and credibility. A headline hitting digital breach or havoc can tarnish your organization’s hard-earned fame as customers wouldn’t want their data to get into the control of mischievous hackers.
Otherwise, they might become skeptical of your commitment to ensuring cybersecurity and thereby get discouraged about partnering further with you. Therefore, commencing a crowdfunding approach for your cybersecurity is a vital testimonial to your diligence, which will consecutively increase your patronage, and boost your credibility.
Increased Security for Your Cyber System
Crowdsourcing is an excellent tool for securing your digital transactions and testing the effectiveness of the security measures you deploy from time to time. You can engage with popular crowdsourcing verified platforms such as GoFund me, Patreon, Rockethub, and others. These platforms have many exceptional members, including extraordinarily cyber experts who can timely tackle any cyber problems you might face.
In this present climax of security risks that hackers can exploit, you can’t afford to be complacent. It would be best if you kept pace with the cybercriminals’ rising profiles who are desperate to wreak havoc in corporate networks and systems. Therefore, you should consider engaging the services of crowdsourcing platforms to keep a dutiful watch on your online security system to avoid any intrusion or unauthorized access. Doing so will highly assure you that come what may, there is top-notch security for your cyber dealings.
Cost Optimization
Crowdsourcing will help you conserve the available financial resources as you don’t have to keep employing cyber experts fully. You only have to pay your enlisted service providers when there is a rendition of useful services such as detection of bug or malware. Crowdsourcing is a no-service, no-pay approach which allows you to affordably and yet effectively ensure your cybersecurity.
Conclusion
Even though there are abundant advantages you’ll richly enjoy using the crowdsourcing technique; you’ve to be careful and thoroughly scrutinize any service you consider enlisting. Cybersecurity is a sensitive approach, and you should consider treating it as such.
Don’t just use any random services to avoid falling into the hands of faceless hackers with ulterior cynical motives. You can make use of verified crowdsourcing platforms to avoid exploitations. Crowdsourcing is still the best approach there is, for cybersecurity, and all man’s needs.
Technology has made it easier to access the crowd’s experience, knowledge and resources.
Crowdsourcing technologies can offer services, funding, and navigation. It’s accelerating problem-solving, innovation and politics.
Speed is critical in the modern digital economy.
But…
Many large companies are too slow.
Crowdsourcing Week developed the Hyperloop Innovation to showcase the essence of embracing talent on demand.
Innovation is no longer an isolated aspect of any company. Every business must pioneer its journey towards innovation.
And…
Crowdsourcing makes it easier and faster to be innovative because it’s bigger than a movement.
The new DNA of the society in the physical and digital world in the future will be crowdsourcing.
Today, fear and scarcity are driving the global economy despite the mindsets being lethal for the society at large. However, crowdsourcing can be the driver of every human on the face of the earth towards their general wellbeing.
All it takes is looking to the crowd for supply to meet demand.
Most crowdsourcing platforms have deployed challenges that users can take part in as often as they want to engage them. The participants are exposed to varied problems.
Crowdsourcing is all about talents, passions, tangible resources, and skills.
Maia Weinstock, the creator of Women of NASA, developed a LEGO toy that inspired a new generation and her invention sold out on Amazon in just a couple of months earlier in the year.
Maia is a science journalist and currently MIT News’ deputy editor.
What other possibilities are available with crowdsourcing?
If you have a rough idea or concept that needs polishing or flushing out, or a problem that needs a solution, crowdsourcing is the way to go.
Crowdsourcing is the facilitation of talents, passions, tangible resources, and skills through high tech platforms. It occurs at all levels across different industries.
Growing connectivity has made it easier to collectively mobilize and contribute time, ideas, funds or expertise from individuals to support causes or projects. This is what defines crowdsourcing.
In the increasingly-connected world, the human-centric future will be about co-creation and participation.
Established business models are finding it hard to adapt to crowdsourcing, which has redefined how companies work. This is attributed to the fact that collective mobilization provides a great chance to reinvent and rethink traditional processes.
Crowdsourcing is also known as:
Co-creation
Crowdfunding
Open innovation
Collaboration
Crowdsourcing is a new work process of sourcing people in crowds to perform a task usually done by a single contractor or employees. The main categories of crowdsourcing include:
Crowdfunding to raise funds for a project or cause as in crowdfunding sites.
Crowdsourcing continues to gain momentum as new trends come up in the industry. Here’re a few trends worth noting:
Top 5 Megatrends in Crowdsourcing that You Should Know
1) Early adoption
Crowdsourcing is a familiar term among many. However, it’s still in the phase of its early adoption.
Many people are familiar with crowdsourcing.
But…
Only a small percentage know everything it can do.
For instance, most tech geeks are familiar with 99designs and its role in crowdsourcing. However, very few can list other roles of crowdsourcing.
Did you know that you can test your new website, build a car or even volunteer your time to a charity through crowdsourcing?
You can also outsource cyber security. For instance, you can post an identity theft problem to get likely solutions from crowds with the right talent. Crowdsourcing will provide lots of things you can adopt as solutions to the problem.
2) Curated crowds
In crowdsourcing, bigger doesn’t necessarily mean better results. The early crowdsourcing design sites days have proven this fact.
For instance, a design contest with an output of 1000 designs can easily become unmanageable. If you offer a large prize, almost anyone with some design skills is likely to make a contribution.
However, this doesn’t mean that a large crowd automatically results in poor results. There’ll be some bad designs among the good.
This means you’re likely to get many good designs to sift through but the bad ones would take up more of your time.
A curated crowd model like Genius Rocket was created to solve this issue. Although any designer can join the crowd, only those who’ve proven to be talented are allowed to participate in projects.
Another site working on a curated model is LogoTournament.
The former has been pushing for the creation of a trade association and is currently discussing it publicly. The leaders are trying to define the crowdsourcing taxonomy officially.
All the efforts being made to standardize crowdsourcing are aimed at fostering a healthy future.
4) Quality Improvements
More crowdsourcing platforms are increasingly adopting microtasking. This is due to the success resulting from deployment of the basic input/output model typical of MTurk and adding another quality control level.
MTurk sometimes provide less than correct results.
However, sites like Microtask & Serv.io have deployed additional QA and redundancy checks to improve accuracy levels. The platforms can maintain high accuracy if requested.
Due to no extra expense involved, people will increasingly demand for 99.9% to 100% accuracy.
5) Corporate acceptance
Crowdsourcing isn’t a fad; it’s enjoying great corporate acceptance.
Several Fortune 100 companies have taken action to adopt crowdsourcing with General Electric taking the lead. The company has several open multi-million dollar innovation projects.
Other large companies running crowdsourcing projects include:
Amazon runs one of the largest crowdsourcing platforms, MTurk.
Large corporations usually don’t implement new processes fast. But, the few that stepped into crowdsourcing will make it easier for other Fortune 100 companies to join the league.
Outsourcing allows nutrition clinics to subcontract third parties to offer services instead of hiring in-house employees to do them.
When you outsource your nutrition services, you’re able to focus on other critical aspects of your business. It allows you to depend on external experts to offer high-quality nutritional care to your clients.
What’s more, the kitchen is responsible for the highest percentage of income loss. This is attributed to the following reasons:
Over catering
Food theft – food is a basic need for humans, hence usually undergoes massive theft.
Wastage – food wastage also occurs in the kitchen, causing loss of income. Mishandled perishable foods go bad and thus end up in waste. Over ordering food also leads to waste because the additions easily go bad.
Outsourcing nutrition to outside caterers optimizes productivity and limits food wastage. Private caterers are competitive and work for a profit. Hence they will be motivated to reduce wastage.
Expertise in portion control allows the outside caterer to save on costs.
Outside caterers focus on food and service; they integrate commitment with well-trained employees to offer excellent food service. They meet and surpass your clients’ nutritional needs.
9 Benefits of Outsourcing to Your Nutrition Clinic
Cost savings
Outsourcing can help your nutrition clinic save costs in thousands of dollars. It eliminates the benefits often paid to in-house employees such as monthly salaries, house allowances, medical cover, etc.
The reduction of food wastage also helps reduce costs. This ensures your clinic generates maximum profits, hence income.
The demand for nutrition services usually changes throughout the year. Therefore, you don’t experience a strain on your salary bill during such times. Outside caterers juggle staff around to meet their changing demands.
The third-party company also buys things in bulk to help reduce costs; they get unbeatable prices. The company also handles the nutrition needs of other clinics, hence are in a position to buy things in bulk to save costs.
Improves quality of care
Outsourcing nutritional care allows your clients to receive services from experts in the area. The external caterers focus on food services, hence improve quality care.
For instance, pro nutritionists ensure that each client’s diet needs are met. Clients who need dietary supplements such as Pruvit ketones have their unique needs satisfied with absolutely perfect diet solutions.
What’s more, you get the time to focus on other important aspects of your business for increased productivity.
Gives access to knowledge and expertise
Outsourcing allows your nutritional clinic to work with nutritional experts with great knowledge in the health area. Therefore, you can easily access the right information and knowledge from nutritional experts. The same applies to your clients.
Reduced overhead expenses
When you let an external team of nutritionists take charge of your clients’ needs for healthy meals, you also delegate related overhead expenses to them.
Therefore, your clinic will experience reduced overhead expenses. This, in turn, saves on costs.
Access to a larger pool of talent/better staffing
Crowdsourcing companies that focus on nutrition have employees who’re well-trained and experienced in the field. They have a team of employees with knowledge and expertise in different areas of nutrition.
This gives you access to a larger talent pool without hiring in-house workers. It also improves your staffing without the overhead expenses that come with in-house staffing.
Allows for conserving or redirecting of resources
You’ll be able to redirect your clinical resources, including employees, equipment, and money, to other important aspects of operating your business. This can help improve the productivity of your nutrition clinic.
Supports efficient use of resources
With your clients’ nutrition needs under a third party, you can efficiently use your existing resources to reduce expenses. You can use your capital, labor, and technology, among other resources, efficiently. This maximizes your efforts but reduces costs for increased outcomes.
Removes the need for paid time off/benefits
When you outsource your nutrition services, you also eliminate the need to pay time off and benefits for employees in charge of that area. The crowdsourcing company is responsible for making those payments to its employees.
The outside caterer is responsible for paying wage overtime, salaries, medical aids, and pensions of all his staff. This also reduces your overhead expenses and thus saves on costs.
Change catalyst
Using the services of a third party also drives change in your clinic. It changes how your clinic operates and how it offers nutritional services.
If you’re a small nutrition clinic, you’re bound to benefit immensely from using crowdsourcing companies. You’ll reduce your overhead expenses and save on costs.
Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) thrive by minimizing
their expenses and maximizing profits. Regardless of their industries, they are
always looking for ways to save more money. And this is why the crowdsourcing
technique has become popular.
Crowdsourcing involves using a large number of people to
seek information, produce goods, or offer services. It outsources the work to
others who are not the organization’s employees.
The introduction of technology has further made
crowdsourcing easier. Now, you can crowdsource online and reach people from
different backgrounds irrespective of the kind of service you provide.
Crowdsourcing is not limited in its use. It has a variety of application that cuts
across various fields.
For instance, security agencies such as the police and FBI
use it quite
frequently to solve security problems. They are known to use crowd
intelligence gathering to seek out information as part of their investigation.
SMEs have also found crowdsourcing very useful. They can
use it to gain insight into what consumers are interested in by asking for
their preferences. It can also tell the demographics and the profile of their
consumers.
If you own a small or medium enterprise, you might want to
learn about the benefits of crowdsourcing.
Here are seven of them.
Reduces Cost
If you have never used crowdsourcing before, you might
think it is expensive. The truth, however, is that it is way cheaper than
traditional methods of employing people. With crowdsourcing, you can cut down
on tax payments, huge employee benefits, and other costs that will arise from
hiring permanent staff.
For instance, if you need graphic design work done, hiring
a graphic designer in-house will cost you thousands. However, crowdsourcing
offers you options of different designers from whom you can select based on
their rates.
Saves Time
As a business owner, you can only hire as many people as your enterprise can afford. However, there are often instances when your employee’s strength might not be enough to get things done quickly enough. If you have a time-sensitive project, this kind of situation might become burdensome and end up unpalatable.
Crowdsourcing can be an easy solution, however. For
instance, if you own a small business, and you need to carry out a market
survey, you can crowdsource online by asking a vast pool of people to vote or
fill out electronic forms. This way, you will be able to get faster results in
a short time frame.
Offers Creativity
Are you having difficulty coming up with new ideas? You
will be amazed at how crowdsourcing can help out. One of its significant
benefits is that crowdsourcing links you up with professionals who will offer
hundreds of ideas or different approaches to solving a problem.
However, if you think a large number of people could
translate to low-quality ideas and solutions, that might be untrue. In reality,
the competition created by crowdsourcing drives people to think outside the box
and offer more creative solutions. You will find out that many successful
organizations make use of crowdsourcing to brainstorm and come up with
mind-blowing ideas.
Offers Diversity
Crowdsourcing exposes you to a vast range of people, which
in turn gives you access to a broad network of skills, thoughts, knowledge,
contents, talent, and expertise that your employees may not offer. When you crowdsource
online, you will interact with people from different cultures and backgrounds
whose unique perspectives can benefit your company.
More Collaborative
Since small and medium enterprises are breeding grounds for
familiarity, many employers assume that their employees are united. However,
the reality is that there may be workplace conflict among them. A more
collaborative approach involves bringing together a group of
people—crowdsourcing—devoid of bias ideas or emotional attachments. Their input
may help you fish out valuable information that your in-house team may have
overlooked.
Has Marketing Benefits
Many companies invite the public for contests, asking them
to come up with suggestions for their services. Many more companies seek out
people to test their products for intelligence gathering purposes. These
methods do not only help them with great ideas, but they also create extensive
media coverage for their products or services, which is a perfect marketing strategy.
When you crowdsource, you give a large group of people
something to talk about, creating a marketing buzz for your company.
Crowdsourcing, therefore, attracts the people who might be your target market,
giving you a more extensive customer base.
Minimizes Management’s Burden
Crowdsourcing is quite appealing as it offers you a chance
to give your work-related burden to others to sort out. It is a way of
delegating duties to make work easier. Think “division of labor.” You share the work
among other people to minimize the burden. That way, you can focus on the
management aspect of the work.
In conclusion, the benefits of crowdsourcing far outweigh
the benefits of hiring in-house staff only. It utilizes crowd intelligence and
creativity, which can significantly reduce your organization’s expenses and
speed up important work. Whereas permanent employees may have idle times,
crowdsourced employees are only needed when there is a job to do.
If you own a small or medium enterprise, you should
leverage crowdsourcing to reduce your workload and get you closer to your
target market. Irrespective of the nature of your service, crowdsourcing will
help you thrive.
The internet is the best technology that came in handy to hasten the delivery of services. In communication, this is one area that people love and appreciate technology. Crowdsourcing personnel attests to the fact that things are now simpler than before thanks to the digital cloud tools. As long as you have access to the internet, you are not worried about where to store or access your data despite the location. However, have you thought for a moment the effect it may have on your health. The internet is the main cause of sedentary life. People do not take the time to engage in physical activity. Crowdsourcers should use this advanced technology to your advantage. There are numerous automatic services; meaning you now have a free time to engage in other activities like meal prep weight loss recipes, take time out to walk around, visit a fitness center regularly, take screening and health checks at specific interval among other. Remember, you need your health to take advantage of the crowdsource operations take good care of your body. Here are a few healthy tips for a crowdsourcer.
Have a weekly visit to the fitness center
Collection of sticky note illustrations
It is automatic for you as a crowdsource personnel to gain weight due to the sedentary life. This is because most of the work involves sitting behind your desk to make sure you meet your daily goals. The busy schedule and the lifestyle have no room for physical activity yet it is advisable. To fill this gap then you need to enroll in a fitness center to take a few exercises that are in line with your fitness goals.
Take time to walk and appreciate nature
Build muscles and allow your body to rejuvenate now that you have been in a specific position for long. A walk in the park has two positive effects; apart from just stretching of the muscles it also gives you a new lease of life bow that you are interacting with nature. This comes in handy to relax and unwind away from your computers and gadgets. Do not allow digital tools like smartphones and social media platforms to be your pass time activity?
Visit the doctors Regularly
Some diseases may not show early signs yet the later stages are always fatal. There are specific screening tests that detect such illnesses for timely treatment. The type of work at times may no allow you to take care of your health. Have a specific date in your diary that you have to visit a doctor and lab technologists for specific tests.
Check on your diet to make sure it is balanced
What do you consume? Have you thought of the number of calories that one consumes at any given time? It is advisable to be cautious of the nutritive content of what goes to your stomach. You need all the nutrients from all the food categories since each of them has a specific function in the body. They include proteins, carbohydrates, and vitamins.
Drink at least eight glasses of water per day
Water is an essential liquid in the body, In fact, is referred to as a weight-loss food recipe. Its main function is to remove toxins in the body as well as rejuvenate the body to prevent dehydration. Besides, the food we consume has a lot of unwanted products and water comes in handy to wash them off.
Health experts advice for regular check-up among the above tips. Besides any changes in your body is a red flag that needs to be checked in a health facility to avoid fatal illnesses.
If there is a topic that has many misconceptions and myths, then, it is weight loss. You will reach a point in which you are desperate to lose weight that you can do anything just to make sure that you can lose that weight of course, in an easier way. Physical fitness is always the most common way of losing weight. At the same time, if you do not do it right then it can even be a source of weight gain. To avoid this, you need to use crowdsourcing just to have diverse ideas on the best physical fitness routine that will aid in weight loss. What is the advantage of info crowdsourcing?
You get workable solutions
When someone tells you that he used some specific exercise then you have a chance to even check the before and after images just as a proof of the success. Some of the terms that are used in physical fitness may be technical. With crowdsourcing, you can use the multimedia content to even create a video and share it online for people to have the correct way of exercising especially for low impact exercise for weight loss.
You have practical exercises for you
You might even just not want to read but you want to practice it if doable in your case. This is the forum where you get a virtual fitness instructor which comes in handy to help you in the physical fitness. At the same time, you might even create a schedule and do it at the same time virtually – thanks to technology.
It can motivate you to act
The moment you know you have people who have gone through the same challenge and you know that you are not alone in this so the more that you get motivated you to make time and effort to have a healthy lifestyle. It is not easy to stick to a fitness schedule but when you know you are answerable to a specific group then you have to option but to stick to it. The long-term effect is that you will reach your goals in a smooth manner.
You widen your support system for the weight loss journey
This is not a walk in the park, you just need a strong support system. Aside from your friends, you can also bank on virtual friends from the crowdsourcing platforms. The fact that it has chat services makes it even bigger and better for you.
Learn from experience
Psychologists say that experience is the best teacher. This is the time you now know that you need to learn the rules of the game from experience, Now that you know that you have the right support system and you are sure that you can stick to the schedule. This is when you now also have knowledge of what works best for you even to teach the rest.
Although confidentiality of crowdsourcing platforms is always compromised, physical fitness is not something that you will really need to hide from people. It is one of the best technological toolkits which was designed to make sure that the objective of the world is a global village is reached.
