BEST PEOPLE SOLUTION!

crowdSPRING

Location
Chicago, Illinois

Business Profile

crowdSPRING is a community-driven marketplace for creative services, bringing the power of crowdsourcing to creative challenges worldwide.  Whether you need a new logo, website, marketing materials or other creative content, you simply post what you need, when you need it and how much you'd like to pay.  Once posted, over 11,000 creatives from 130 countries around the world will work on your project and you'll begin to receive actual work - not bids or proposals - to review.  And, as the entries come in, you'll be able to review, sort, rate, give feedback and collaborate with creatives until you find "the one". 

For creatives, crowdSPRING offers powerful tools 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.

Simply put, creative people want to be creative.  The explosion of so-called ‘user generated content’ - from Threadless and iStockPhoto to YouTube or even blogs - is proof positive that people are looking for outlets for their creative talent, whether it's graphic design, photography, video or copywriting.  crowdSPRING is empowering this underground, underdog creative community and giving them yet another outlet for their creativity. 

crowdSPRING was founded on three core principles: offer Buyers choice, give creatives a level playing field, and protect intellectual property for all.  Our model takes the risk out of buying creative services by offering buyer's choice up front - a huge advantage over the old model for over half a million small businesses started in the US each month.  We empower an untapped worldwide creative community and level the playing field by allowing creatives to compete solely on the basis of their talent.  And we protect the intellectual property of all by offering completely free, customized written legal agreements for every transaction - something that no other site in the world has done.

Visit http://www.crowdspring.com

Contest Entry

Challenge:
Our tight-knit eight-person company just suffered the loss that every small business dreads: our star employee was lured away by a much bigger company with much deeper pockets!  And, while we're excited for her, it's obviously a huge blow to us.  To make matters worse, she's in a marketing position that we couldn't afford to go unfilled - especially in this economy.  Plus, we knew we'd have to get creative to overcome the fact that we're 7 nerdy Web guys working out of a basement and looking for a creative marketing type to join us.

Solution:
We thought about taking out a personal ad but something about "7 guys seek adventurous creative type" just didn't seem like a good idea.  So, we turned to what we know: the internet.  We started with a single, free, and totally outstanding job posting (http://chicago.craigslist.org/chc/mar/923148301.html).  Then we shouted it from the mountaintops.  We put it on our blog and Facebook and Twitter.  We sent it to our friends and relatives and people we met at a party once.  And, magically, people started to take notice.  They blogged about it.  They Tweeted about it.  They told their friends about it and passed it around. 

The next thing we knew, we got an application an hour for days and days on end!  In the end, the response was positively ridiculous.  We had someone send us gigantic cookies with 'Please hire me!' written on them in frosting.  We had someone create a truly amazing video (http://vimeo.com/2293525).  We had someone send us a keg (yes, really), a shoe (to get their foot in the door) and a shirt with 'Hire Michael!' emblazoned on it.  One girl Photoshopped herself into our company photo and then started a write-in campaign by having over 70 people post articles in their blogs recommending her!   

When all is said and done, we didn't do anything that someone else couldn't do.  In fact, we don't like to admit it but it's just like mom said: just be yourself.

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