The civil service is expert at gathering specialised knowledge to address problems. Crowdsourcing complements that by getting solutions to problems from more diverse individuals with varied skills and experiences. It allows policy makers and the public to work together to come up with a large number of ideas and to test whether policies are practical and can be implemented.
It is particularly helpful for keeping policy up to date in a fast moving world. Crowdsourcing is not new, but digital technologies have made it much easier to do on a larger scale.
Best practice examples
Civil servants have already successfully used crowdsourcing:
Gathering evidence for policy making
The Department of Business, Innovation and Skills used crowdsourcing to ask businesses which regulations were unnecessary and could be scrapped.
Collecting ideas on how to improve services
NHS Citizen brought citizens together to work together on how to solve problems in their local NHS trusts.
Creating new projects with the public
DfID’s Amplify project brought together designers and communities to help improve safety in cities.
Checking facts or process data
Fix My Street allows the public to report holes in roads. Lapor is an Indonesian portal where citizens can report corrupt officials.
Creating campaigns to engage the public on an important issue
The Dementia Challenge created a debate around what policies were needed to deal with dementia.
Crowdsourcing is also used regularly in the private sector and science. Wikipedia crowdsources content. Amazon get the public to review its products. NASA even uses crowdsourcing to help map Mars.
When to use or not use crowdsourcing
Use crowdsourcing:
when your policy area would benefit from engaging with a broader and more diverse set of people than your usual stakeholders and you’re looking for new ideas – it is not about replacing conventional policy making, but about providing additional input and insight; it does not involve ‘leaking’ policy, but instead is about asking the public to help you solve a problem
with small specialist groups or in private (for example by using a closed LinkedIn group or email – see more details in the tools section below), as well as with larger numbers of people
a good stakeholder network or social media presence can make crowdsourcing easier and quicker – it can take more time and resources than traditional policy making, but there are quick and free ways of doing it (see tools below)
Crowdsourcing is particularly useful for:
testing out a policy to see if it is practical and can be implemented effectively
giving power to and engaging with citizens
getting a broader range of ideas about a policy area
creating transparency, as crowdsourcing is usually done openly, unlike conventional consultations
Do not use crowdsourcing:
if you have already decided what action you are going to take; however, even if your minister has decided on a course of action, you may still want to consider crowdsourcing how to implement the policy
crowdsourcing would not be appropriate if your policy involves, for example, national security; but you can still seek expert advice, even in these sensitive areas, with techniques such as challenge panels
How to crowdsource
1. Talk to your digital team/press office
They will be able to advise on your social media strategy, help get conventional media coverage and also advise on which tools your department has access to (see tools below).
2. Decide on the question or problem you want to solve
Work out your overall question and stick to it. Keep it simple but broad enough to gather meaningful ideas. For example: ‘How do we improve public safety?’ may be too broad a question. ‘Should we put more lighting on Mosley Street?’ is too narrow. While ‘How do we improve the safety of young women at night in poor, urban areas?’ is more likely to draw out clear solutions. Ask questions clearly and set parameters eg how much money is available.
3. Don’t build it and assume they will come
Crowdsourcing is a good way to get ideas from a wide selection of people, but you have to make an effort to reach them. If you don’t already have a good network of stakeholders, create one and ask them to spread your message through their networks. People tend to respond more readily with ideas if the project is championed by people they know. Talk to people where they usually congregate eg community blogs. You can find some useful tools to help you do this in the social media analysis technique.
4. Communicate clearly with your audience
Make it clear to your audience how you will use their ideas. Will the best ones be presented to the minister? Are you looking for ideas for a particular urgent policy or just gathering views? You should feedback to the public regularly on progress and which ideas are being taken up so that they do not feel disillusioned with the process. Lobby groups may also try to hijack a crowdsourcing project, but this is usually obvious and should be dealt with in the same way as in a traditional policy making process.
5. Develop ideas
The ideas that are initially submitted may still need development or research to turn them into policy proposals. One way to manage this is to send out an initial call for ideas and then sift these for the best proposals. You can then work with the public and experts to develop the ideas further until they meet your requirements. The Amplify project is a good example of how this works in practice.
6. Be diverse
Whilst you can define your target audience by stakeholder mapping, the point of crowdsourcing is to reach different people. Try to engage with a mix of different ages, genders, professions and cultural backgrounds for a wider range of ideas. Using local radio, newspapers and TV as well as local events and partner organisations will help you reach people who might be digitally excluded. Media channels are often interested in running articles on crowdsourcing projects and can help you get the word out easily.
7. Provide content
It can be helpful to give your audience background information on the question you are interested in. Link to reports and articles on the topic and give them data and statistics and also ask them to share their useful content. The more informed your audience are, the better ideas your crowdsourcing project will generate.
8. Be transparent
You should also make it clear that ideas will be published openly unless there is good reason not to do so. You should be aware of data protection rules and not share personal information like email addresses gathered from crowdsourcing.
Tools
Ask your digital team which tools they have available as you may be able to access some paid for tools for free. You may also wish to combine some of these tools for a more effective campaign. For example, a social media campaign would help you publicise a crowdsourcing website or a town hall event.
Tool
Cost
Time
Email & surveys
£0
1 hour with a few days for responses
Social media
£0
A few days but if you don’t already have a social media presence you will need time to plan and build up a community
Online crowdsourcing sites
£0 to £2000
1 to 6 months
Email and surveys tool
Email and surveys are quick and easy tools to allow you to start crowdsourcing.
Email
The easiest and cheapest way to start crowdsourcing – and a good way to see if crowdsourcing is useful for you – is to start by emailing your stakeholders.
Create an email with your question, what you will use the responses for and why you want to crowdsource. Check this question with your team and line manager. Don’t waste your stakeholders’ time with a very minor question or raise something very controversial without warning them first.
You can then email this to your stakeholders with a contact email address and ask them to respond and to circulate it to their networks. Depending on the number of responses you expect, it may be worth using a generic team email to manage a large number of responses. Once you have gathered responses, it is best practice to reply to those who have responded with a summary of your findings and what you are likely to do next.
Depending on the nature of the consultation, you may also want to publish their responses or share them with others who have responded.In this case you should state this in your email in case someone does not want their response to be made public. When you circulate the results, do not include email addresses or contact details to comply with data protection.
Surveys
If you would like more detailed data from your responses, ask people to complete a survey by using an online tool like Survey Monkey (ask your digital comms team or colleagues which tool they would usually use for this).
Surveys allow you to ask people to give more detailed and structured data about for example their ages or occupations. This would give you a better understanding of who has responded and how diverse or representative they are.
Emails and surveys are useful for small-scale crowdsourcing or crowdsourcing among particular groups of stakeholders. However, they do not necessarily allow your question to be sent out to a wide variety of people. Social media will allow you to create a more wide-reaching campaign.
Try it out in under 5 minutes:
email or use an online survey to ask your stakeholders a clear question about a problem in your policy area
make it clear why you are asking the question and what you will use the content for
feedback the results of the survey to your stakeholders and thank them
Social media for crowdsourcing tool
Social media can help you to reach a broader audience with your crowdsourcing.
Introduction
You can use many types of social media for crowdsourcing including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Yammer, Instagram and Flickr. Before you start to use social media, read your departments guidelines on social media use and talk to your digital communications team. Even if your department does not allow you to use Twitter personally, your press office may be able to run your social media campaign for you.
If you are new to social media, find out more about using Twitter in this guide from tech experts Mashable.
You can simply crowdsource by asking people to contribute via social media. Or you can use social media to point people to a website with more information about your project or a crowdsourcing site where they can contribute ideas.
How to use social media for crowdsourcing
Basic techniques
Choose the most appropriate channel
It’s best to use the communication methods that your audience is most comfortable with so find out where they discuss your kind of topics and go there. For example, LinkedIn is a good place to find business people. Ideally you should combine a range of different channels depending on who you would like to reach. Community forums and relevant blogs can also be a good way to reach specific audiences.
Use social media analysis tools
These tools can help you find who is talking about the topic you are interested in and how to reach out to diverse groups who may not have engaged with your project yet. Read the social media analysis technique section for more details.
Create a handle/hashtag
If you’re using Twitter, you should ask your digital communications team whether you should create a new twitter handle (@xxxx) or use an existing one. It can be useful to create a hashtag for your crowdsourcing campaign, but search Twitter first to make sure nobody else is using it, to avoid confusion. You should also see what other hashtags people use to discuss similar content and include those in your tweets.
Remember this is a dialogue not a monologue
Government Twitter can sometimes simply broadcast what we want people to hear. However, for successful crowdsourcing your social media campaign should create a dialogue where government responds to individual people. Talk to your digital team about best practice.
Be prepared for negative comments
Social media is a democratic forum and people may want to express their displeasure with the government or with your particular policy. If crowdsourcing is done well, the public response is usually positive as people welcome being asked to contribute.
Influencers
Find the influential people who are already talking about your area on Twitter. Follow them and engage them in conversation to see if they will help you increase debate around your crowdsourcing project.
Provide relevant information
Tweet out useful information to get the conversation flowing. Infographics, pictures and links to relevant articles will make people more likely to read your tweets and more likely to engage with your question because they have some background data to work with. Ask them to share their information as well.
Closed/open
Most crowdsourcing projects are open about the ideas that have been submitted so the public can rate and discuss them. However, for certain specialised or sensitive discussions you might want to use a more closed environment. For example, you could use a members-only group on LinkedIn or Yammer to allow people to discuss things which might be commercially sensitive or that they might not want to share openly. On very sensitive topics such as sexual assault, you need to allow people to comment anonymously, ask them if you can use their contribution anonymously and remove any identifying features from any information they allow you to publish.
Other useful things to try
Use Twitter hours
Twitter users run regular hour long sessions where groups of people discuss certain topics for an hour every week. For example there are local twitter hours: #northeasthour and hours for specific industries: eg #agrichat for the farming industry. It’s best to get in touch with the people running the hour and ask them if you can join and discuss your crowdsourcing topic. The Department of Business, Innovation & Skills (BIS) asked #agrichatuk to host a discussion to help them hear farmers’ opinions about an upcoming consultation. Read about BIS’s use of Twitter for research.
Use Twitterchats
These are similar to Twitter hours but you organise them yourself. Find a couple of experts who you think your audience would be interested in discussing the topic with. Arrange them to be available for an hour or 2. Then spread the word via your Twitter account and through your stakeholders that people can ask questions and join the debate at that specific time. If you want to engage a very large audience in a campaign around your crowdsourcing project you can organise a Tweetathon. This is a collection of webchats linked together around a theme. You can read about Defra’s forest tweetathon.
Live Tweet events
If you are running stakeholder engagement events including town halls meetings or open ideas days, it is helpful to live tweet these and encourage the participants to tweet with your hashtag. this is a good way to spread the word much more widely than the people at the event itself and helps encourage debate about your topic.
Don’t forget images
People love to share videos and photos on social media. A good way to engage people with your crowdsourcing campaign is to ask them to share photos of relevant objects or people on Instagram, Flickr or Twitter.
Try it out in under 5 minutes:
search for your policy area on Twitter
try to find a relevant Twitter hour – see a list or use a search engine
ask the person who runs the hour if you can ask them to discuss a few relevant questions
join the debate, ask your questions and thank the respondees
Online crowdsourcing platform tool
Introduction
Online crowdsourcing platforms can help you gather more ideas and allow your audience to rate and vote on them.
There are a number of different commercial crowdsourcing sites. Many government departments have already subscribed to some of these tools so civil servants should check with their digital communications teams to see what is already available. Other public sector platforms like NHS Citizen make their code freely available to use, but it would require resources to tailor this code to your specific project. Most of these tools were designed to be used openly, but if you have a particularly sensitive topic you might want to use tools like LinkedIn, Crowdicity or Wazoku (more information below) which also allow for closed conversations.
This guide will mention some sites that government has used or tried out. This does not imply endorsement of any particular product. The open policy making team is always looking for new crowdsourcing tools, so if you have used or know of alternative tools, please provide feedback to us.
Examples of tools that civil servants in the UK and elsewhere have used for crowdsourcing include:
Citizen Space
Citizen Space was used for the Deputy Prime Minister’s Northern Futures project to collect ideas on how to create a new economic hub in the North of England. The Treasury also used this tool to gather ideas for the Spending Challenge.
NHS Citizen
NHS Citizen is a specially created site that gathers and develops ideas on how to improve hospitals and the health service. The project is in development and the source code will be available freely for other people to build similar platforms.
Wordpress platforms
The Department for Business, Innovation & Skills built a bespoke site based on Wordpress to allow the public to comment on regulations for the focus on enforcement project.
Wazoku
The Ministry of Justice, NHS England and the Department for Education have used Wazoku to crowdsource ideas. The Ministry of Justice used it to gather public opinion on out of court disposals. Wazoku can be used for both open and closed crowdsourcing projects.
Citizens Foundation
Reykjavik City Council uses a platform called Your Priorities to crowdsource ideas. Those ideas are voted on by the public and the best ones are debated every month by the City Council. You can use this platform for free, although Citizens Foundation also offers paid consultancy.
Open Ideo
The Department for International Development uses the OpenIdeo platform for its Amplify project.
Local council budget simulator
Some local councils are also using online budget simulators to allow residents to debate how money should be spent. Redbridge Council created a platform to do this – read how they implemented the project. The YouChoose tool is available free to all local councils and local authorities.
Crowdicity
Crowdicity is used by the NHS, the third sector and businesses to crowdsource ideas from their employees. This crowdsourcing platform can be used for projects where you do not want the ideas to be automatically open to the public.
Hackpad
For small scale projects where you want a more fluid exchange of ideas, you could also use a free platform like Hackpad. The Government Digital Service uses Hackpad to ask the public to discuss design changes to GOV.UK.
How to use a crowdsourcing site
1. Plan out your campaign
A campaign usually involves 4 phases:
start promoting campaign
generate ideas
rate and vote on ideas
analyse ideas
You need to allow enough time for all 4 phases so plan backwards from the date when you need your policy ideas to ensure you can fit all of them in. You usually need at least 3 months for a successful campaign, unless you have a very active stakeholder community or social media presence – or a dedicated digital team to help you. If your question is quite broad, you may want to divide it up into smaller sections and ask the public to comment on different parts every few weeks.
2. Set up your site
Explain clearly why you are crowdsourcing, what your question is and how you will use people’s input. You may also want to upload background information like reports or add videos and images to the site to engage people’s attention and give them more information to base their ideas on.
3. Spread the word
Ask your press office and network of stakeholders to spread the word about your crowdsourcing project and ask their networks to take part by sharing the link to your site. Also, you can use a social media campaign (see social media tool) to publicise your request for ideas.
You must consider the needs of the digitally excluded and ensure that you include TV, radio and national local press if possible in your media strategy. Ask them to publicise the crowdsourcing website, but also add alternative ways of engaging for example an address for letters or even a phone line (ideally freephone). In Africa, the Amplify project broadcast calls for crowdsourcing engagement on local radio and then transcribed the ideas for the crowdsourcing site.
4. Plan peaks in campaign
To sustain interest in the campaign you may want to plan engagement activity every few weeks. For example you could run events or do a Twitter question and answer session, or publish a video.
5. Switch to asking people to rate
After you’ve collected a suitable number of ideas, you may want to upload any ideas that have come from different channels eg Twitter, email or phone/letter to the site. You should then ask people to rate the ideas and select which they like most. Make it clear that you will be selecting on the quality of the ideas, not just how many votes they get as this avoids ideas being voted up by lobby groups or people’s friends.
6. Develop ideas
Depending on how complex your project topic is, you may want to help people develop the ideas that you have selected in order to turn them into more detailed policy proposals. For example, Amplify and NHS Citizen ask contributors to collaborate to develop ideas further. Better Reykjavik offers experts to work with the public to develop their ideas.
7. Select final ideas and publicise results
Finally, policy makers should select the best ideas and communicate these to the public, particularly anyone who has participated in the crowdsourcing exercise. It can also be helpful to issue an infographic or summary of the themes of all the ideas which have been submitted so that people know that their idea has not been ignored or lost. You should publish this on the crowdsourcing site and inform people that the crowdsourcing exercise has finished.
Try it out in under 5 minutes:
place some non-sensitive content that you would like feedback or input for onto a Hackpad
email the link to your stakeholders and ask them to contribute and spread to their networks
analyse the results and thank your contributors
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