RSSCrowdSpring Creative Design Crowd Sourcing
Categories: Crowd Sourcing, startups
Written By: Vardaan
CrowdSpring has launched its crowd sourcing modeled online platform for creative design. CrowdSpring is an online place to collaborate and contribute in new design ideas mainly in logo design, graphics design, website, business card designs etc.
Buyers looking for a new logo, website, marketing materials or other creative content simply post what they need, when they need it and how much they want to pay. Once posted, creatives from around the world will submit actual work – not bids or proposals – for the buyer to review. As the submissions come in, buyers are able to review, sort, rate, provide feedback and collaborate with creatives until they find the “the one.”
The similar model website are there such as Klusters, Fellowforce and a very close to it is 99Designs.com which too have design projects to work along with owners and freelancers/ collaborators.
For creatives, CrowdSpring offers powerful tools and a platform to showcase their talents on a worldwide stage. In addition to allowing anyone, anywhere to reach a global audience for their creativity, CrowdSpring also offers powerful community tools such as public profiles, private messaging, portfolios, and creative community forums.
When a buyer posts a project, they choose how much they’d like to pay and CrowdSpring holds these funds, along with a project fee of 15%, in escrow until the end of the project.
Once the project is complete, the buyer chooses the submission they like best and CrowdSpring pays the winning creative. If the buyer hasn’t received at least 25 different entries to choose from then they’re free to ask for a full, unconditional refund – no questions asked.
Creatives using CrowdSpring are never charged to participate, they’re paid 100% of the money they earn without any fees, charges or commissions.
November 11th, 2008 at 11:44 am
Hi Vardaan – you’ve done a very nice job summarizing crowdSPRING in your post. Thanks so much for writing about us! We have nearly 9,000 creatives from130+ countries now working on crowdSPRING (we’ve profiled some of them in interview in our blog – http://blog.crowdspring.com), and buyers from 35 countries have posted projects. Here are eight things we do that NO other marketplace offers:
1. Escrow required in every project. We don’t post a project until we hold the funds in escrow. Designers tells us that they want assurance that they’ll be paid. We make no exceptions. That’s one reason why we have some of the best designers working online, working on crowdSPRING. No other marketplace requires this.
2. Customized legal agreements. We build dynamic, customized legal agreements for each transaction on crowdSPRING so that both buyer and creative are protected. These contracts take into account the location of the buyer and creative, so that the contracts will differ for everyone. We don’t just provide a form. No other marketplace has this.
3. Full project management. Buyers are able to review entries, comment on them, score them, iterate and collaborate with creatives. The wrap-up for the project takes place on our site. We handle file transfer for example, including final deliverables. We require proofts from the winning creative before final deliverables are accepted.
4. We take care of payment. Since we hold the funds in escrow, we pay creatives. Anywhere in the world. And we pay 100% of the awards. Our commission (15%) is charged to buyers, not creatives. No other marketplace has this.
5. Robust notification and communication system. We have a full PM system and granular notifications (set by users) that will notify buyers and creatives about activities in their pojects or projects they are watching. No other marketplace has such a robust PM system.
6.In our cS Pro projects: full privacy control for buyers. For their own projects, buyers decide what others see and when they see it. Projects are not indexed by search engines. No other marketplace has this.
7. Required non-disclosure agreements. Just like the dynamic system of contracts we’ve offered since launch (above), we’ve built a dynamic system of non-disclosure agreements. We require users to agree to non-disclosure before they can participate in Pro projects – and we provide buyers with copies and control over whether users are permitted to participate. No other marketplace has this.
8. Full user control for buyers. Buyers can decide which users can participate, can block users, and can change their mind at any time. No other marketplace has this.
And you are absolutely right that we never charge creatives to participate. We hope that your readers come take a look.
Best,
Ross Kimbarovsky
co-Founder
http://www.crowdspring.com
January 5th, 2009 at 4:11 pm
What they don’t is the number of revisions needed. Take a look. The few I’ve seen get good results took over 500 revisions.
If you value your time, then maybe you know why other designers get paid more!
January 15th, 2010 at 7:07 pm
After reviewing the CrowdSpring and DesignCrowd websites, I concluded that DesignCrowd's was more intuitive and easier to use. Although I am happy with the web design I selected, DesignCrowd's site was problematic in many ways. In addition, I sent three emails to them during my design contest and they did not respond to any of them. Crowdsourcing ended up working for me, but in spite of the DesignCrowd site, not because of it.
February 26th, 2010 at 1:19 am
DesignCrowd's site is more intuitive and they also have higher quality designers. I used DesginCrowd and their customer service was excellent. They were the only site in this space to have a phone number on the home page I could call. Maybe you were unlucky …