The crucial importance of feedback in online co-creation

We found four types of motivation for participating in online co-creation projects, and feedback is crucial to keep them fun and fulfilling

When we talk about the 4F’s of online co-creation (Fun, Fulfillment, Fame and Fortune), we know what we’re talking about. We found that members of eYeka’s community of creatives was motivated by a variety of things, one of them being Fulfillment. We tend to underestimate peoples’ willingness to be creative, but to sustain it, it is crucial to provide people with feedback about their creative work. This is not always easy, especially when brands ask for confidentiality… but it’s possible. Here are some examples of how our clients provide feedback to our community.

Confidentiality is a major issue when it comes to open innovation, crowdsourcing and co-creation initiatives. Our clients indeed rely on eYeka for strategically important subjects like product innovation, packaging design, brand positioning… and understandably, they want to be the only ones to see the content; which makes perfect sense! But how do you keep a crowd of contributors motivated when you can’t show them others’ creations? One way is to ask brands for qualitative feedback about the community’s creative output. Take a look at the Mini Oreo Team’s feedback for participants of the Introducing Mini Oreo contest:

Dear Community,

We […] wanted to thank you all across the world for the amazing contribution to our Mini-Oreo project !! We have been honestly overwhelmed by the great responses we’ve received. Both in term of number of proposals and in quality of execution.

It has been a pleasure and a lot of fun to look through the hundreds of print advertising you’ve submitted. Not 2 creative ideas were similar, and you brought a lot of humour, emotion, and creativity to your work. And more importantly, you gave us a lot of insights in term of how to position our Mini-Oreo cookie. So we wanted to warmly thank you for that. It sounds like such a ‘cliché’ if we say it was very hard for us to reduce 500 submission to only 4 winners, but it truly truly was ! So a big apology to those of you who are not in our final 4 list – we guarantee you that it certainly wasn’t for lack of creativity !

So thanks again for all your help & enthusiasm on this project. We wish you all the best for your next submissions.

Kind regards

The Oreo Team

Oreo wanted to gather fresh ideas to review the positioning of it’s « mini » version, the Mini Oreo cookies. As the client said, « [the community] gave us a lot of insights in term of how to position our Mini-Oreo cookie« . This type of feedback is of great value for a community which can’t see the contest entries. We’ve applied this similarly to other « private » contests:  Gemalto gave feedback on innovative credit card concepts, Clorox gave feedback about new ideas to reinvent household products…

Even in public co-creation contests where creators’ work is visible, it’s important to encourage client feedback to the community! It takes 3 to 6 weeks and a tremendous amount of personal time for a creator to come up with a brilliant idea or a video, and only a few minutes to write a thank you message that will go a long way to acknowledge this hard work and keep creators motivated, and fulfilled.