Crowdfunding & Crowdsourcing
Both are innovative approaches, both requires a tremendous amount of collaboration to a achieve accomplishments. Gathers crowd full of talents or capital can improve growth, increase work efficiency and make the impossible possible. Profit and non-profit organizations are utilizing both methods to revolutionize productivity (Schweissguth 2019).
Crowdfunding and crowdsourcing might be similar, but there are key differences between the two. People should understand their definitions and differentiation to help them decide which tool they need to boost their efforts with the power of the crowd (Schweissguth 2019).
What is Crowdfunding?
According to Smith (2019), Crowdfunding is collecting small amounts of capital from a big amount of people to fund a new business venture or campaign. Crowdfunding utilizes the accessibility of the social media platforms and crowdfunding websites to bring all investors together. It has the potential to increase entrepreneurship by increasing the number of investors and extend beyond the owners and capitalists.
Through crowdfunding, new products and technologies are created. Platform such as Patreon fund artists to create films, music and art, while developers design new application or games. The use of crowdfunding also empowered disaster relief with funding from throughout the world.
What about Crowdsourcing?
Hargrave (2019) defines that crowdsourcing is an action of obtaining work, information, knowledge and opinions from a large group of people who contributed their data online via social media and phone applications. People who contribute for outsoucring some worked as paid freelancer, while there are some contribute on voluntarily. For instance, traffic applications use data contributed by the driver to report roadway accidents, traffic situations and even police checks to other application users in real-time.
To further explain crowdsourcing, the process is not as straightforward as crowdfunding, this is due to crowdsourcing is more varied (McGowan 2018). There are a wide of things that can be crowdsourced and following are the few examples:
- Finding a logo on the website 99designs, were users submit options and the client picks their favorite one.
- Wikipedia is a crowdsourced encyclopedia, with thousands of people from around the world contributing every day.
- Asking a Facebook community for opinions on which bank to use is an example of crowdsourcing.
- The hugely popular technology development site GitHub often utilizes crowdsourcing to solve technology problems.
- Journalists and bloggers use crowdsourcing to gather a wide range of opinions or viewpoints, sometimes on sites like HARO.
Conclusion...
The difference between crowdfunding and crowdsourcing
The differences between the two depends on the end result. With crowdfunding, people are seeking to raise capitals from the crowd to fund projects and campaigns. While with crowdsourcing, people are seeking anything else, like information, manpower, talent, skills and ideas.
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