Through Springwise I ran into an initiative of Tour d’Afrique Ltd. a Toronto based company named for its flagship cycling tour that annually traverses the African continent from Cairo to Cape Town. They have started to crowdsource cycling tours through an operation they call Dream Tours.

The text on their homepage: “Do you have a dream expedition on a bike that you would like to have others to join you on, help you get it off the ground and share the costs? Do you have a dream tour that you wish someone would help you implement it? DreamTours will revolutionize the way cycling tours around the world are created. You create your DreamTour and the community around the world makes it a reality.”

Crowdsourcing is hot, however getting it to work for you is not easy. I believe this initiative is aligned well to be successful. I’ll discuss a number of prerequisites for successful crowdsourcing and community management.

The community is passionate

These guys organise life experience cycle tours. They started with Cairo to Cape Town tour. A trip of 12.000 km in 120 days. They now have 5 of such epic journeys in their program. The people participating in such events have to be passionate. If you ask people with passion to come up with their dream, you’re bound to get interesting input. Currently there are 25 proposed tours.

The community is focussed but there is enough room for creativity

A very difficult aspect to deal with when you engage the crowd is to give them enough focus without destroying creativity. A mistake many companies make when asking the crowd for input is that they formulate the question/challenge broadly to get as many diverse ideas as possible. Such lack of focus is often detrimental for the quality of ideas. You get too many irrelevant ideas. The low quality will scare people away as they are not willing to invest energy into something of such poor quality. Furthermore, in such cases you also see the organisation itself lose interest and the initiative dies. So you need to apply focus. The level of focus correlates with the passion the community has for the subject. The more passion, the more you can apply focus. I believe Dream Tours has found the right balance. The only thing people are asked to do is plot a trip or in other words their dream. The planning and organisation is done by Dream Tours if the route gets enough buy in from the community.

What’s in it for me?

One of the key aspects in having a lively community is answering the “What’s in it for me?” question for the people you would like to contribute. If it isn’t clear how people can benefit from contributing, they will not. The benefit can be as straight forward as prize money or more intangible like feeling good about yourself. “What’s in it for me?” also correlates with the passion of the community; talking about something you love is very satisfying to most people. Not sufficiently addressing this subject is the number one reason for failing communities.

In this case, the answer to the ‘What’s in it for me?’ question is very clear. You get to plan and share your dream journey. If your journey is selected and enough people sign in, you have the option to ride for free or share this prize with the others as a group discount.

How can the Dream Tours community improve?

A powerful way to improve the quality of ideas generated by the community or spin of new ideas is what we call ‘enrichment’. Others enrich ideas that were posted previously. In our practice we usually witness that the true brakethrough comes from insights other people add to the ideas. For Dream Tours, I imagined that people would go crazy enriching the tours proposed by others. Enrichments such as special sites to visit, special mountains to climb, etc. There is no real enrichment activity on Dream Tours. I would suggest Dream Tours to start inviting their members to enrich each others tours. And why stop there? Why don’t they also put their own tours in the community for others to be enriched?