Use crowdsourcing for social and environmental sustainability

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Have you heard the one about crowdsourcing? This one company decided that instead of having an employee perform a task or outsourcing it to a contractor, it would issue an open call asking a large, undefined group of people to do it.

Sounds like a joke? Crowdsourcing is for real, its explosion enabled by the Internet. Companies with a sustainability mindset can now tap into the power of the crowd to pursue their purpose.

Many smart organizations have recognized that harnessing the collective intelligence of the masses can help them efficiently and effectively solve problems, make decisions, create value, or complete tasks. Though crowdsourcing comes with its own idiosyncratic issues and challenges, everyone has expertise that companies can use — at relatively low cost and quickly.

Why use crowdsourcing? The new Cone Shared Responsibility report has found that 84 percent of Americans believe "their ideas can help companies create products and services that are a win for consumers, business and society." However, only about a half feel companies are "effectively encouraging them to speak up on socially and environmentally beneficial practices and products."

For Cone, "this disconnect signals a lost opportunity for companies because consumers are prepared to reward them for engagement." As a result, according to Jonathan Yohannan, Cone's senior vice president, "There’s tremendous opportunity to more actively collaborate with consumers and other key stakeholders to achieve mutually beneficial solutions."

Sustainable businesses can put crowdsourcing to work on a variety of tasks: designing or improving products and services; suggesting or voting on features; generating innovative solutions to problems; funding a cause; or creating valuable content.

Based in Portland and using this last approach is the collaborative book in-the-making, "The Portland Bottom Line: Practices for Your Small Business from America's Hotbed of Sustainability." Out in November 2010 and co-edited by Megan Strand and I, the book is a collection of 150 short, 400-word chapters by Portland's small-business leaders, each sharing one sustainable business practice they successfully implemented in their companies. The book's purpose is to show how small businesses can innovate to put people before profit, help restore the ecosystem, and prosper.

The reward for participation in many crowdsourcing projects is intellectual satisfaction, self-realization, or sheer altruism. Because companies use crowdsourcing for their own ends, rewarding the crowd with prizes or recognition may be an even better motivator. Sustainability-minded companies can potentially combine the two approaches, particularly if they harness the crowd for social or environmental benefit.

The benefit of contributing to "The Portland Bottom Line" is two-fold: sharing and spreading your company's sustainable business practices with the readers, and contributing to the support of a local community organization that helps people launch or grow their own businesses. The book's contributors will vote on the project's beneficiary from among nine sustainability-oriented organizations. The selected nonprofit will get 100% of the book's profit.

Whether you call it the crowd or community, the people you need for your crowdsourcing effort are out there, waiting. Crowdsourcing can help bridge the gap between your company and your community as a path to engaging people in your efforts around sustainability. First, learn more about crowdsourcing and adopt the mindset. To put yourself in the crowd's shoes, consider passing on one of your businesses best sustainable practices by contributing a chapter to "The Portland Bottom Line."

You see, none of us is as smart as all of us. And that includes you.

Peter Korchnak runs Semiosis Communications, a sustainable marketing company. He recommends the following resources for more on crowdsourcing: “Crowdsourcing," by Jeff Howe; “Infotopia," by Cass Sunstein; “Wikinomics," by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams; and “The Wisdom of Crowds," by James Surowiecki.