Get the Crowd to Play

The liason of crowdsourcing and gamification is extremely powerful and a terrific way to motivate your community through incentives.  

Gamification is a very simple concept; as the name implies, it's making a game out of something that isn't normally played as one.  Odds are you are already familiar with the concept; if you ever received a gold star for a job well done in elementary school, you've experienced gamification.  

And this simple concept is taking the business world by storm.  In an article in the New York Times, they discussed the power of gamification, and even gamified the article itself.  The reader would get badges (e.g. one for reading all the way through the article) and although the badges offered no other reward than having them, and transferred to no other section of the paper, readers were posting comments saying "I'm commenting just to get the badge.". 

But groups aren't only adding gaming elements to their crowdsourcing; some are making games to perform the crowdsourcing itself.  California-based Institute for the Future launched a crowdsourcing game to discuss the future of community hospitals. Their goal is to tap into collective multidisciplinary expertise to encourage and steer change - and making a game out of they easily generated 4500 ideas within their 24-hour competition time-period.

Meanwhile, the University of Washington has "Foldit," a game where players to find stable protein structures.  Amazingly, advances in cures have been discovered thanks to use of the crowd's insight and expertise. And then there's NASA; having launched "Clouds," a game where players identify types of space clouds, NASA now has nearly 250,000 of those stellar objects identified thus far. The lesson here, it appears, is that crowdsourcing becomes a lot easier when the "crowd" gets to play. 

The most powerful gamification feature on UFOstart is the startup value - a badge that measures your individual value to any startup. The more contacts, investment interest and skills you add to your profile, the higher will your startup value and your rank within the community be. Also, every project round runs against the Deal Clock. This gamification allows your project to be measured against time, which will enable you to pivot, integrate feedback and develop as a lean startup. 

We will be adding a review and badge system for people who have completed jobs or who have contributed to needs. Another feature will be a virtual currency (points) for activity on UFOstart - this way track records will be created and active participants rewarded. If you would like to add your voice to the gamification of UFOstart or our general product development, please visit our feature voting site!

-bmt

Join our first "Global Crowd Network" for Lean Startup funding! Connect with facebook on www.ufostart.com and calculate your Startup Value. Interested in how you can leverage the power of the crowd for your startup? Like us on facebook and follow us on twitter!