This document discusses getting users to contribute online content and summarizes strategies used by UCSF to encourage contributions. UCSF promoted their research networking and crowdsourcing tools through emails, presentations, and an iPad sweepstakes. Initial promotions saw sharp increases in site visits and profile editing, but editing levels fell off without continuous promotion. To be successful, tools need seed content and incentives, senior support needs to be apparent, and messaging must clearly explain the value of contributions. Getting contributions requires realistic expectations of what is needed to engage users.

1. Going Beyond “Web 2.0” as Buzzword - Engaging Users to Contribute OnlineManinder Kahlon*, Leslie Yuan, Rachael Sak, Kristine Moss, Cynthia Piontkowski, Sarah Paris, Eric Meeks, Katja Reuter*Presenter. CIO & Co-Director Consultation Services, CTSI, UCSF

4. Getting Users to Contribute Online is Hard, and Even Successful Models Have Low Participation Rates Wikipedia 78 million visitors monthly, 91,000 contributors 0.1% of viewers are contributors Jan 2010, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About “Causes” application, Facebook 25 million signed up for application, 185,000 donated 0.7% of users actually donated to any of 179,000 nonprofits. Apr 2009, http://www.useit.com/alertbox/participation_inequality.html 33:66:1 Rule? Crowdsourcing within the enterprise (IBM) Stewart, Lubensky & Huerta, 2010. “Crowdsourcing participation inequality: a SCOUT model for the enterprise domain” Proceedings of the ACM SIGKDD Workshop on Human Computation 90:9:1 RuleLurker : Intermittent Contributor : Heavy Contributor http://www.useit.com/alertbox/participation_inequality.html

7. Provost Email

8. iPad Sweepstakes – Add Narrative to Win

9. Direct Mailing to all ~2500 faculty in db

11. Promotion had a sharp impact on editing of profiles

12. Profiles are edited by all types of faculty

13. Narratives edited most because sweepstakes required it. But once there, users edit other items.

14. Increasing site visits doesn’t automatically increase the probability of users editing profiles

15. Overall Strategy - Multiple Approaches Get the Word Out: Continued Promotion Sequence of talks; Ambassadors; Other traditional approaches Horizontal: Distribute access and increase cross-linking Feeds, Mini-Searches, integrate with other major ucsf websites Seed System: Launch promotion Incentivize to get people to use the tool once & edit profiles Vertical: Add domain-specific functionality and make participation a side effect Eg. Mentor-mentee matchmaking Push: Provide ways for updates to get to interested researchers Emails with new pubs for validation

16. Crowdsource ideas for research enhancing projects that would be funded. For Yr 4 Funding Target: CTSI leadership – 35 For CTSA ARRA proposals Target: CTSI leadership, affiliates, those active in our projects - 300 For CTSA Renewal Target: UCSF academic community – 7500 Crowdsourcing– What we did

18. Comment on ideas

19. Vote (Like or Dislike)

20. Filter by Idea Topics

21. Sort Ideas by popularity or commenting

22. Receive E-mail Notifications for updates on ideas of interest

23. Revise collaboratively to move idea forward

25. To the degree we’ve succeeded, this is why Ensure you know why you want users to contribute content Seed tools with high-value content Provide focused incentives that are very clear Get senior sponsorship and make that apparent to your user Fine-tune messaging to map onto the true benefit of the tool and to proactively deter negative associations

26. Getting users to contribute online is worth it and it’s doable, but be realistic about what needs to happen to get it to work.

27. Thanks to the Virtual Home team at CTSI, UCSF Special thanks to Katja Reuter, CTSI Communications Manager, who envisioned and implemented our promotions.