Crowdwise

by RedesignMe.com

About how companies put Co-creation into practice

Archive for category Communities

Feedback is the core of co-creation

Jan 17

Posted by Jochem van Kapel in Co-creation, Communities, Crowdsourcing, Open Innovation | 2 Comments

The RedesignMe community consists of over 4200 members and is growing every day. Our members have many different backgrounds and expertise and this variety generates an enormous potential for companies and the members themselves.

Measuring motivation
Our community is a creative motor solving problems and generating ideas for our clients. Ofcourse we aim at providing a good and motivating online environment so that the power of the community can harvest its full potential. When we extend our tool’s functionality and make changes to our site we want to avoid guesswork. Our user metrics, discussed in the previous post, give us lots of information on what users do, but not really why they do it. Therefore it is very important to get answers from community members directly.

To get these answers we recently did a little research amongst our members. We wanted to know what motivates them to participate, and how they feel while spending time on our site. The following are outcomes of discussions we had with our members and the result of an extensive survey we sent to our entire community.

Rewarding is key!
Receiving RDMs for a Redesign scores very high on motivation to stay active in the community. Not necessarily because RDMs can be exchanged for money, but because receiving RDMs proves the quality of the contribution. Members who contribute to a Challenge feel appreciated when the quality of their contribution is recognized, especially when that appreciation comes from a community manager working at the company. Receiving money for contribution proves to be of lower priority.

Feedback is key!
Members who receive positive (and negative!) feedback on their Redesigns feel, on average, more compensated for their work. Positive feedback as well as negative feedback motivates members to improve their contribution and/or create another one. This means that all feedback on a Redesign or comment has a positive influence on the motivation of the creator.

Conclusion
This clearly underlines the importance of community managers. Feedback is the core of co-creation; co-creativity lives on feedback from stakeholders. Without decent feedback motivation drops as well as the number of contributions to the Challenge.

Co-creation communities are worthless without user metrics

Jan 1

Posted by Maxim Schram in Co-creation, Communities, Crowdsourcing | No Comments

RedesignMe.com has been running for over 2 years and hosts a select group of designers, marketeers and consumers. From day 1 we have been closely watching our member’s online behaviour inside of our community. This lead us to some interesting observations.

User categories
Some members send in a lot of designs and concepts, others just love to rate ideas and write comments while another group only seems to browse the site now and then without posting anything. These conclusions came from interviews we had with our members (more about this is in one of our next blogposts) and from looking at individual profiles one by one. Of course, as our community grew bigger and bigger, this called for automation.

Custom User Metrics
Unfortunalely standard tools like Statcounter or Google Analytics only track overal traffic and can’t really measure individual behaviour. That’s why we decided to built a custom “Community Metrics Dashboard” that automatically groups people into a certain behavioural category and tracks shifts in behaviour over time. This way we can measure how and when our targetted online campaigns and newsletters have the desired effect. It also helps us determine which Challenges and questions are too dificult and what can be changed about that. While the tool is still very simple it is already very powerful.

Universal
The Dashboard can’t only be used on the RedesignMe community of about 4300 members but also on our client’s communities like the one of Albert Heijn and the Dutch Ministery of agriculture. These groups are  smaller and this make community management even more important because smaller groups are harder to mobilize and get a grip on.

Conclusion is that user metrics in co-creation communities are very powerful and important. Without them, you don’t really know what’s going and you may feel like a blind person visiting the fair. Without thorough user metrics it can be difficult to leverage the full potential of your community.