Not by Giveaways Alone: How to Inspire People through an Online Contest

“Ideas are like pizza dough, made to be tossed around.”

ー Anna Quindlen

Online contests have superpowers. There are many ways you can build projects that concentrate human efforts, steer imagination, and inspire great things. For millions of people, an online competition they enter for the sake of some free stuff can turn into an opportunity to grow. We’ve collected the most striking examples of contests that can both convert and inspire.

Why should people build projects through an online contest?

Inspiring new ideas means providing people with a good incentive or a prompt that subsequently turns into reality. The main reason for using contests as motivation boosters is that they have the power of awakening the competitive spirit, a feeling that is vital to creative processes.

But, how do we know what impact a contest is going to produce? There’s a golden rule that can help organize idea-centered events: mission – first, profit – later. If one of your goals is to increase sales or traffic, prioritizing the value offer is essential when you want to awaken creativity.

The ways to involve people into building projects through an online contest

Contest organization requires two-way thinking. Apart from determining your business goals, it’s critical to analyze the objectives of your target audience. Indeed, if you don’t understand what people want, you won’t be able to find the key to their creativity. Do your research and pick a resonating strategy. Here are several practical insights into how you can motivate an audience for project development:

Extracting shelved ideas

Finding inspiration isn’t always the key thing. What matters to many creative minds is finding the right outlets for their brilliant ideas. To avoid idea shelving, you can set up inspiring online contests which encourage people to share the projects they’ve never had a chance to implement.

HubSpot has good experience supporting outstanding ideas through competitions. Last year the company launched a big idea hunt promising to award the winner $100,000 that he/she could spend on project implementation. The prospective entrepreneurs were asked to go to the HubSpot Facebook page and share one business idea they thought could revolutionize the industry.

By writing 25 words or less, a person winning the HubSpot online contest could make a dream come true and enrich the industry landscape with one more inspiring business project.

Takeaway: Ideas need an outlet. Think of a contest that can not only showcase a project idea, but also create the space for project realization.

Idea crowdsourcing

If one person isn’t enough to implement a project, set up an online contest that targets idea crowdsourcing. These are competitions the core missions of which are to engage maximum participants ready to fight a serious social, climate, or economic issue. There are several ways to inspire your audience by idea crowdsourcing:

• Present a public project that communicates a social mission online and set the contest rules that ask people to raise awareness of a brand developing this project.
• Organize hackathons, workshops, or brainstorming sessions. Collective intelligence and common work can be the best way to implement a project.
• Synchronize peoples’ activities by assigning tasks that have to be completed in order to reach project implementation.

MIT’s Climate CoLab is a collaborative platform for collecting crowdsourcing contest ideas. With hundreds of projects including Wikipedia Contributions and Workspace Building, the organization is a profi in the consolidation of human creativity.

Project development that inspires project development

In her TED Talk on business benefits of doing good, Wendy Woods talks about a brand new concept that should substitute for corporate social responsibility (CSR). The concept is called TSI (total societal impact) and implies the use of corporate resources for the implementation of new, inspiring projects that can make the world better.

In the mentioned TED Talk, Woods refers to the story of Mars, a popular American corporation providing products like coffee and chocolate. If you go to the website of Mars, you find a huge sustainability development plan that features corporate initiatives like partnering with NGOs and small farms, managing smart land use, and more.

The best way to inspire people for building projects is to start with your organization doing good. Implement projects that stand out in the industry and have meaningful social or economic impacts. Take the idea from there and organize a project asking people to contribute. Who knows, maybe these contributors will grow into change-makers getting inspired by your ideas!

Inspiration building tips: How to inspire people through an online contest

To maximize the effects of an online contest and reap the benefits for your community, make use of the following tips:

• Inspire by examples. From Phil Robertson to Steve Wozniak, there are thousands of stunning personalities realizing vital dreams. Explore the preferences and interests of your audience to understand which ones appeal to them the most. Then, start embedding these success patterns in your contest organizing strategy.
• Inspire by buzz. By building social buzz and catering to a wide range of communities, you can create much hype around your contest idea. Infect the target audience with your event vibe to awaken maximum creativity.
• Inspire by tools. The use of innovative tools in contest organization is the great way to inspire technology-driven ideas. Automate your work with a powerful contest management software and let people enjoy the process of participation.

Conclusion

An effective online contest can give birth to an one-in-a-million project idea. Use an automated contest management system and make the creative juices flow!