On my way to speak at Microsoft’s MIX10 conference yesterday morning, I saw a group of six people sitting along a wall. Each of their t-shirts had a single letter printed on the back, and the letters spelled the word EVOLVE.
I’ve been thinking the past two days about how I’m personally evolving, the ways in which crowdSPRING is evolving as a company, and how our community is constantly evolving to adjust to new obstacles and challenges.
How are YOU evolving?
Every day on the crowdSPRING Twitter account and on my own Twitter account, I post links to posts or videos I enjoyed reading or viewing. These posts and videos are about logo design, web design, startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! Here are some of the links that I’ve liked and shared this past week!
Ultimate Roundup of Free User Interface Icons - http://bit.ly/bip6kI
Data Visualization Techniques - http://bit.ly/dxlv2N
25 Ultimate Useful PSD to HTML Tutorials - http://bit.ly/a9VqNL
Best User Interface Design Resources: The Round-up - http://bit.ly/bQ6f4W
The LG mobile phone design competition on crowdSPRING has started! $80,000+ in awards - http://crowdspring.com/LG
40+ Creative Example of Web Interfaces and Web Design - http://bit.ly/a8BaB5
Guiding Principles for UX Designers - http://bit.ly/cXHIJV
100 Essential Web Development Tools - http://bit.ly/cA04J4
Four Ways to Mix Fonts - http://bit.ly/9Nm8Uf
50 Yellow Web Designs to Inspire You - http://bit.ly/9TkOYL
27 Celebrity Caricatures by Jason Seiler - http://bit.ly/cZ4Y8E
Great List Of Free PSD Files For Web Designers -http://bit.ly/b1QFFh
17 Logo Design Case Studies - http://bit.ly/bMKNzx
Bryan J. Sebastian of Innova Apps, Inc. shares how his company uses crowdSPRING for logo design and web design and why he thinks other startups and small businesses should consider leveraging crowdSPRING’s community of more than 55,000 designers and writers.
More about Innova Apps: Innova Apps, based in St. Charles, Illinois, helps companies by developing software (including websites) using popular technologies, at a reasonable cost.
We’re spending a few days at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, so I thought that I could share notes from three of the sessions. In a few days we travel to Las Vegas for the MIX10 conference and I’ll share some of the goodies from that show next week.
Austin is packed this year – more panels, more attendees, more packed restaurants and lines to get into parties. Kinda overwhelming and makes me wonder if they may start to limit attendance next year. Might be a good idea to set a cap on the number of people and the number of talks….
“In Code We Trust: Open Government Awesomeness” was an interesting panel about open government initiatives, sharing of data, and collaboration between government and citizens. The panelists discussed access to census data and pending legislation, which was interesting, but more so was President Obama’s initiative on open government and his directive that departments use challenges and prizes to encourage innovation and cost savings (Ross discussed this in a post last week).
“Imagineering the Fully Digitized and Connected Future” imagined the conected world in 2015. The main themes the panelists discussed were how in 5 years every surface is a screen (not just your refrigerator), buying things bleeds into all areas of our lives (advertising is everywhere and access to those products is instantaneous) and cell phones become “stitching” devices which connect the user to all of the data and functions which will surround us.
“Monkeys with Internet Access: Sharing, Human Nature, and Digital Data” Clay Shirky writes and teaches about the “social and economic effects of Internet technologies.” His phenomenal talk (no doubt one of the best of this year’s lineup) focused on the concept of the 3 forms of sharing: goods, services, information. Shirky posits that yhe first is hardest for us (and research shows also for primates in general), second is relatively easier, and the third is easiest. For instance, the sharing of music CDs is sharing goods and so we hesitate before we give our CDs away. Sharing services, such as creating and giving away a mix tape is is a bit less onerous for most of us. But easiest of all is sharing music in the form of information (i.e. digital files); evolutionarily, we are biased to sharing information and we LIKE doing it. To Shirky, the refusal to share information is spiteful and the music industry’s expectation is that with digital files we should “act out of spite.” This expectation and the maneuvering to prevent sharing has proved disastrous to that industry. Another “big” idea that Shirky spoke about was the idea that abundance is a bigger challenge to society than scarcity. We know how to deal with scarcity of goods and information, but abundance changes the world we operate in and the fundamental equations of business and society. (Think about the controversy that crowdSPRING generates within the design industry and you get the idea)
Nice to see Chicago’s WGN talk about crowdSPRING in their news segment last night (at 0:55 of the video).
Big thanks to @maltier for letting us know about WGN’s story about crowdSPRING.
Later today begins a new day at crowdSPRING and a new approach to our community. When we launched in May of 2008, we offered buyers a simple guarantee, and made an equally simple promise to creatives. We guaranteed “25 entries or your money back” and promised creatives that when a project reached the 25 entry threshold, someone would be paid. Buyers could be confident that they would have a choice of designs, and Creatives could be comfortable knowing that their interests were being protected.
Our guarantee was effective – we refunded a very small percentage of the projects on the site. But those refunds still represented awards that designers in our community would not receive, and the policy left a few buyers unhappy (a few who had received more than 25 entries, but could still not find “the one”).
We want every buyer to be happy with their experience on crowdSPRING and with our community. We also want our community to benefit from every project posted.
Later today, we are introducing a new guarantee: to buyers we say “you will be 100% happy with your project or your money back” and to creatives we promise that one of you will be paid for every project on the site, even if the project ends in a refund. The benefits to the community are clear: buyers will feel more comfortable posting their project (which we believe will lead to more projects on the site) and creatives will take home more cash.
Here’s how it works: when a buyer posts a project, they will still determine the amount of their awards and will pay the crowdSPRING project fee of 15%. They will also pay a $39 “listing fee” – the listing fee will be non-refundable. These fees will fund a “kill fee” pool, for any project which ends in a refund, and we will choose one participant from the project who will receive the kill fee. The kill fee will be capped at $250 and the person who is paid the fee will retain all of the rights to their entry. There will be no wrap-up in such projects.
We are proud to continue to innovate as we refine and improve our business model. If this policy had been in place in 2009, our community would have received an additional $73,000 in project awards!
More than 54,000 designers and writers now work on crowdSPRING, and we’re excited about the opportunities ahead. We hope you’ll agree that the new guarantee benefits the entire community, and we hope you will join us in wishing everyone good luck with their projects!
Every day on the crowdSPRING Twitter account and on my own Twitter account, I post links to posts or videos I enjoyed reading or viewing. These posts and videos are about logo design, web design, startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! Here are some of the links that I’ve liked and shared this past week!
A Guide To Typography On The Web – http://bit.ly/9V601u
15 Logos That Look Like Other Things – http://bit.ly/cBOofx
74 Simply Stunning Line Art Logos For Inspiration – http://bit.ly/axawhE
60 Breathtaking Examples Of Beautiful Typography – http://bit.ly/dxPx4t
Common Questions About Design Professionalism – http://bit.ly/bAj8Pf
How to design a successful logo – http://bit.ly/dgrT8Q
Showcase of Textures in Print Design – http://bit.ly/9KWm7b
80 creative examples of logos featuring animals – http://bit.ly/djOxjZ
Ultimate Photoshop Tutorials to Enhance Your Skills – http://j.mp/aEnDXi
How to Kill the Design Community – http://bit.ly/9SYhin
The Crime That is Business Clip Art – http://bit.ly/aABnxs
Astounding Ajax/CSS Forms: 30+ Modern Trends , Tips and Techniques – http://bit.ly/afHnQk
30 Stunning Graphical Vector Tutorials for Improve your Graphics Skills – http://bit.ly/cm4uQL
So You Call Yourself A Designer? – http://bit.ly/9cFq7D
14 Visually Stunning Animated Infographics – http://bit.ly/cuZ06V
Useful And Professional Free Photoshop Brushes – http://bit.ly/bGLSYs
The Measure Of Type: An overview of typographic measuring terms – http://bit.ly/bU8TDx
The White House has embraced crowdsourcing, urging federal agencies in a memo issued on March 8, 2010 to use challenges and prizes to crowdsource innovative approaches to governmental initiatives and programs. Within the next 120 days, the administration will release a web-based platform to manage the government’s crowdsourcing efforts.
Some of you might recall that the U.S. House of Representatives recently ran a web design project on crowdSPRING. The project was a phenomenal success and the new web design has been launched – you can see it here.
Earlier in 2009, Representative Mike Honda (15th district of California – which includes Silicon Valley), ran a project on crowdSPRING for the redesign of his website. That project was also a phenomenal success and the new design can be seen here.
The government’s embrace of crowdsourcing is connected to President Obama’s goal to create a more transparent, participatory and collaborative government. Here’s the opening paragraph of the government’s memorandum:
At the outset of his Administration, President Barack Obama signed the Memorandum on
Transparency and Open Government, committing the Administration to creating a more transparent, participatory, and collaborative government. On December 8, 2009, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued the Open Government Directive (Directive), which required executive departments and agencies to take specific actions to further the principles established by the President’s memorandum. The Directive also tasked the OMB Deputy Director for Management with issuing guidance for the increased use of challenges and prizes to develop new tools and approaches to improve open government. This memorandum highlights for agencies policy and legal issues related to the implementation of the Obama Administration’s commitment to increase the use of prizes and challenges as tools for promoting open government, innovation, and other national priorities.
We applaud the federal government for embracing crowdsourcing and supporting innovation.
In our 12 Questions blog series, we feature interviews with someone from the crowdSPRING community. For these interviews, we pick people who add value to our community – in the blog, in the forums, in the projects. Plainly – activities that make crowdSPRING a better community. Be professional, treat others with respect, help us build something very special, and we’ll take notice.
We’re very proud to feature Bryan Blue Cuevas (crowdSPRING username: blueii) today. Blue lives and works in Manila, Philippines.
1. Please tell us about yourself.
There’s something about interviews that unnerves me but WOW, I’m being interviewed. That’s so cool!
Hey there! My name’s Bryan Blue Cuevas but you can call me Blue. I’m a quarter of a century years old living in Manila, Philippines. I graduated with a degree in Fine Arts where I majored in Advertising. The odd thing is that art and design were never my first choices. I’ve already finished a year in medical technology before I shifted to Fine Arts where I realized that designing is my passion. It gave me perspective on what I wanted to do as a career. Moving on… I’ve worked at a couple of design/advertising agencies where I learned the ropes of the trade. After which I went to a large FMCG corporation where I worked as the in-house designer for their packaging, labeling and other collateral. I stayed on for a year then I started my freelance practice at www.bluescue.com. On to a more personal side of myself. I have a girlfriend of 4 years and 2 toy poodles (yep, I know. Very manly huh?). I love japanese and mexican food. I hate waiting in lines.
2. What is the design industry like in the Philippines?
I couldn’t really say much since I’m just one of the thousands and thousands of creative people that make up the whole design industry here. But in my own opinion, it’s getting better now since a lot of the agencies and schools of design are opening their minds to different styles and not just focus on the trends.
Photo: tifotter
Einstein famously said, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted” while Count Von Count (pictured above) said “That’s TWO! Two worried frogs! Ha ha ha ha!” Einstein was right in so many ways, but I believe that in the context of small businesses and startups, the Count was the one who truly grasped the full import of collecting and leveraging business intelligence data. In today’s world of software and data, it is so easy to count everything which might be of value, that there is no reason not to. The trick is in how you leverage that information, and how you design access to it. In other words: count everything you can, but take the time to determine how to prioritize that which you do count, and what to pay attention to when you look at that data.
As I have discussed here before, I am a proponent of a goals-driven framework for business strategy and tactics. I believe that strategy should be devised to help meet meaningful goals and that tactics should be implemented to support the strategy. The key ingredient in goal-setting is a defined metric, and the ability to measure progress towards that goal is via (duh) the data that must be tracked and gathered. In the absence of meaningful information, decisions can easily be made for the wrong reasons and priorities can be improperly set; managers need to make rational decisions and let those decisions be driven by data first, and intuition second. Many owners and managers of small businesses find that they make their decisions by instinct, that they “fly by the seat of their pants,” often in the absence of the meaningful data which should help to drive those decisions.
Here are 5 tips for gathering and leveraging data to drive a rational approach to defining and meeting goals and formulating and executing strategy.
1. Debate and strategize. First determine what it is you are trying to accomplish and how you intend to get there. it could be something as simple as increasing revenue; improving the monthly traffic to your site; or gaining a better understanding of your customers to improve satisfaction. No matter what it is, first debate with your team exactly what the important goals are, and make sure they are measurable based on the data you have the ability to collect. Set a strategy to accomplish the goal: more revenue? Maybe the strategy is to increase lifetime value of your customers, or maybe it is to increase per-order revenue. More traffic? maybe the strategy is to improve word-of0mouth. Better customer satisfaction? Maybe the strategy is to reduce wait times for customer service requests. In any case, measure, measure, measure.
2. Collect and organize. This is a process which can be as difficult or as easy as you make it. At crowdSPRING we have a database that is fairly easy to query and a process for creating new queries quickly. This allows us to set up simple tools to pull specific types of data using date ranges. For instance, we pull a weekly report on all new projects posted, which includes some immediately useful data (how many projects were posted last week, what was the value of those, which buyers posted them) and some data which might come in useful later (time of day the project posted, IP address of the buyer, date/time of buyer’s registration on the site) . This data is aggregated in a spreadsheet, which allows a quick update every week.
3. Sort and prioritize. The data collected must be sorted to be useful; for instance the New Projects report I mention is default sorted by date and time, because it is our priority to understand projects and revenue on a daily and weekly basis. If it were our priority to understand average award in projects, we would default to that.
4. Display and visualize. Different people look at data differently. I tend to consume mine best in the form of a chart or a graph, while Ross prefers to eat his data raw, just the numbers in front of him. Excel and other spreadsheet programs give you simple and powerful tools for setting up charts, graphs, and tables, and these can be leveraged in ways which make analysis simple and fast, which leads to the next point:
5. Analyze and theorize. Data in a vacuum is meaningless; we use the data we collect to measure our progress against goals, and to determine the efficacy of our strategy and tactics. Some analysis is simple (how many projects posted last week), but it can get very complex. We typically theorize the impact a new tactic will have on our progress towards a goal and we then measure our progress from the date of that implementation. This analysis helps us to determine whether to continue an effort, abandon it, or modify it. When a small business is constrained by its own capacity (as so many are) it is critical to know when to move on.
Collect your data – all of it – but use it to serve a greater master: your goals and your strategy.
crowdSPRING is the world's #1 marketplace for entrepreneurs, small businesses, nonprofits and agencies who need custom logo design, web design, a new company name or other writing and design services. Over 110,000 designers and writers work on crowdSPRING. We are trusted by more than 27,000 happy clients around the world.
