Flowtown is pleased to bring you our first big Internet-wide round up: 11 quality crowdsourcing websites that can help you brand your business and improve your products. Crowdsourcing is a system in which a number of people independently work on an assignment from you and submit their best effort. You may then pick your favorite submission and pay only that person for their work. Croudsourcing allows businesses to overcome creative problems encountered by working with only one designer, or the same few creative thinkers at the office, as your business comes to be defined by their specific tastes. With croudsourcing, you can make use of hundreds – if not thousands – of creative minds from all over the world, giving you the opportunity to break the usual company mold and release something truly original.
CrowdSPRING
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CrowdSPRING is a vast community of designers and writers ready to tackle all of your logo, website, and content creation needs. Getting started is as simple as posting the specifications of the job you want done and naming a price for the winning entry. According to their website, most entries get an average of 110 submissions, out of which you are free to select the one you like most and reject the others.
99 Designs
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Whether you need designs for logos, icons, websites, WordPress blogs, or even t-shirts, there are designers on 99 Designs ready to take on your job. The website claims most work orders get around 96 submissions and that they have paid designers over $600,000 in the past month alone. In the unlikely event that the client does not like any of the many designs submitted, 99 Designs allows him or her to reject them all for a 100% money back guarantee.
NameThis
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Having trouble coming up with a name for your new company or product? NameThis is a site that allows you to describe what sort of service or product you offer, giving hundreds of minds the chance to suggest names to you. Currently they have paused submissions pending an overhaul to their system that is purported to streamline the process and allow for an even better experience. However, interested new users are still allowed to sign up and check out the system in preparation for the new relaunch.
Kluster
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Kluster is a unique service that can help you make strategic decisions within your company. By registering all of your employees and partners on the site, they are given the ability to suggest answers to questions like “what should our new slogan be?” and “where should we open our new office?” Using weighted opinions, you can grant certain people or groups of people (such as board members) more authority than others, giving you a customized overview of the opinions of everyone who works at your organization.
PopTent
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PopTent is the number one crowdsourcing community for advertising and marketing related needs. If your company needs commercials, billboards, banner advertisements, magazines spreads, or something similar, the community on PopTent will eagerly compete to win your prize payout. Current high-profile featured contests are being held by Amazon.com for its Kindle device and Bounty paper towels, each promising cash payouts of $7,000-$12,000 to the winner.
CrowdFlower
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CrowdFlower is a “Labor-on-Demand” system that helps businesses quickly and effectively outsource tasks that are more accurately performed by a human rather than a machine. Tasks may include categorizing a list of hundreds of websites by theme, or describing the contents of photographs. Essentially, the cloud-based site helps businesses lower the overhead costs associated with traditional outsourcing while providing them with high-quality work.
Flickr Creative Commons
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Flickr Creative Commons is a website that provides designers with excellent stock photography for little or no money. There are several different types of licenses that thousands of photographers attach to their images that grant businesses and designers varying privileges with their work. Creative Commons can help you find high-quality images needed for all sorts of branding and design needs without having to pay the exorbitant fees that private, hired photographers might charge for their copyrights.
Charodix
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Have you ever wished you could get a wide variety of feedback on a new product design or brand image before it went to market? After all, your team might be phenomenal at what they do, but it is the public that will ultimately decide how your latest endeavor will fare on the open market. Charodix allows you to gain exactly this sort of feedback, allowing you to improve existing products, invent new solutions to common needs, or tweak your next marketing campaign before spending the money on releasing it upon the world.
RedesignMe
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RedesignMe allows businesses to harness the creative power of a community of specialized problem solvers. If you are looking for ideas on how to accomplish a technical feat for a new product, or a new design for an existing product that you feel could be selling or functioning better, simply post your challenge and reward amount to the site. The members of RedesignMe will submit design concepts and ideas to you, allowing you to pick the best one and send them their earned reward.
uTest
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If your company specializes in software or online products, then you can forget about seeking the services of an expensive quality assurance firm. uTest offers business access to 25,000 QA professionals from all over the world, all of whom are ready and willing to put your latest software build through the ringer and deliver to you reports of its strengths and weaknesses. Worried about the cost of paying all of these workers? Fear not – uTest guarantees a full QA solution for “20% of hiring one additional staff member.”
Ponoko
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How many times have you had an idea for an amazing new product but discarded it because you don’t possess the talent to professionally design and manufacture it? Ponoko puts an end to this problem by allowing anyone to upload sketches (or even pictures of sketches) to their community and call upon the crowd of designers and manufactures to quote you prices on how much it would cost to create for real. There is virtually no limit on what you can have designed and built on Ponoko, after all, their logo is “Make, sell & buy almost anything.”
