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3. 
No Panhandling.
Stop trying to market things to your community. You're there to support them and not to sell to them. The marketplace emerges organically, from the conversation, and not the other way around.

4. 
Retention Matters.
Too many community leaders spend all their time chasing new members. Don't. In DIY communities, bigger is not always better. Plus, if you're constantly trying to increase membership, you're neglecting the members you have—which is an easy way to lose them. Retaining the members you have, making certain they are happily engaged. That's far more important.

5. 
Delegate.
Distributed leadership is key. Let community leaders emerge, and be sure to spread power around. Find your best blog poster and put him or her in charge of the comments section. Find a friendly power user and put that person in charge of greeting new members. Delegate contests and research projects and everything else. And do this with authority. You're the benevolent dictator, so establish guidelines and clear responsibilities, provide training when needed, and create perks to reward all this participation.

Remember, you don't need to be huge to be effective, but if you're looking to grow, the best place to start is with the basics. “People like talking to one another,” author Seth Godin (who himself has an enormous community) once said. “We evolved to want to do that. So one of the most highly leveraged and powerful ways to grow a tribe is to
connect people to each other. But, if you just have that, you have nothing but a coffee shop. On top of
that
, there needs to be a message from you, the leader, about where you want to go, about the change that you want to make in your world. You need a mission, a movement, a place that people want to get to.”
²⁶
In other words, you're not going to grow without a clearly defined MTP and a place for people to get together to try and attain that MTP.

With these basics in place, here are seven effective strategies for expansion.

1. 
Evangelism.
Word of mouth is still the most effective way to grow a community. Get your members talking about your efforts. To help create early interest in Local Motors, the staff visited sites frequented by car designers. Jay Rogers explains: “We'd simply say, ‘We're going to make a car that you guys design. What do you think?' The important thing is to plant the flag, tell people what you're going to do.”

2. 
Play Well with Others.
Partner with neighboring organizations. Do this in the real world; do this in cyberspace. One of the reasons TopCoder exploded in membership was because they partnered with Sun Microsystems—with Sun both providing more members and the validation that this community was doing something special.

3. 
Competition.
People love to compete. Leaderboards, rating systems, incentive prizes, whatever—give people a way to square off against one another and they will show up.

4. 
Pick a Fight.
One of the best ways to strengthen a community is to go into battle against a common rival. Find an enemy. Take a stand.

5. 
Buzz Marketing.
Edgy demonstrations of new tech/products/ideas spark buzz and attract followers. Better Blocks, for example, creates community improvement flash mobs. They band people together to paint bike lanes on streets, plant trees in public spaces, and create outdoor cafés and pop-up shops—all
without governmental approval. Not only does this help them build their community, the point they make with these crowdsourced, temporary urban improvements usually leads to changes in legislature and long-term urban renewal.
²⁷

6. 
Host Events.
This has been discussed before, but it's worth repeating: nothing brings people together like, well, actually bringing people together.

7. 
Technical Optimization.
If you want a larger online presence, don't forget the tried and true: search engine optimization tactics, AdWords, Facebook advertising, etc.

Okay, so you are, after all, an entrepreneur, and making money—at some point—matters to you. Monetizing your community can be more art than science, but there are several hard and fast rules worth remembering.

1. 
Transparency and Authenticity.
DIY communities are built on openness, so if you plan on making money from your community, don't hide this fact. Put it in your mission statement. Post it on the site. Everyone we interviewed agreed that being forthright about money means less trouble down the line. Moreover, there's a good chance your community is also looking for ways to make money from their passion, so drive engagement by making monetization a topic for discussion.

2. 
Sell What the Community Builds.
The easiest way to make money without alienating members is to help those members make money too. This is the strategy that worked for Local Motors, TopCoder, and a great many others. And if your community isn't building products, they are still building up expertise. You can sell this too via guides, summaries, ebooks, lectures,
podcasts, whatever.

3. 
Cater to the Core.
Give the people what they want. Sell products that are authentic and do so after you have an established reputation. Chris Anderson waited years before trying to monetize DIY Drones, and when he did, it was by offering to build what his community had designed but (in some cases) had neither the time nor the resources to actually build—fully assembled quadcopters.

4. 
All the Typical Stuff.
You can, of course, sell ads to outsiders and premium membership to insiders—these are typical approaches—but again, remember to cater to the core. Make sure your advertisers are selling things the community really wants. Similarly, selling premium memberships can work, but make sure that membership really has privileges and that those privileges don't detract from your established community. Giving paid subscribers access to job boards works great. Giving paid members access to events does as well, but know that if discussion boards end up dominated by insider chatter—that is to say, you had to be there to understand—then people who didn't attend the event aren't going to stick around for long.

I want to close out this chapter by mentioning that two of the exponential crowd tools discussed in this section are themselves mechanisms to turn a crowd into a community. The first is crowdfunding. When a crowdfunding campaign is successfully completed, all those who have pledged are now part of your community. At the conclusion of the ARKYD Campaign, we had 17,000 new members to collaborate on with our MTP.

The second mechanism is where we're going next. It's the topic of our final chapter, the incredible innovation accelerator and community-building strategy that helped launch my career: incentive prizes.

This final chapter focuses on one of the most powerful mechanisms available to the exponential entrepreneur for solving big and bold global challenges, a tool used by powerful companies and successful entrepreneurs. This exponential crowd tool is the
incentive competition
, an idea that combines all of the lessons discussed throughout this book and taps into the most power force in the human psyche, our search for significance.

An incentive competition is straightforward. Set a clear, measurable, and objective goal and offer a large prize to the first person to achieve it. As we shall see, this mechanism pulls together most of the knowledge from the previous nine chapters: the use of exponential technologies, thinking at scale, crowdsourcing genius, providing opportunities for crowdfunding, and stimulating the creation of DIY communities. Moreover, incentive competitions are brutally objective. They don't care where you went to school, how old you are, or what you've ever done before. Billion-dollar corporations compete as equals
against two-person start-ups. They measure only one thing: Did you demonstrate the target goal of the competition?

For the exponential entrepreneur, the incentive prize is a mechanism for solving a personal challenge or a global injustice or bringing a new technology into existence. As I mentioned earlier, my original use of incentive competitions stemmed from my desire to figure out how to get myself into space. I had given up on NASA being my ticket, instead turning to commercial space flight as a way to develop both the technology and the wealth needed to get myself off-earth. But there was another impetus as well.

In 1993, I received a copy of Charles Lindbergh's 1954 Pulitzer Prize–winning book,
The Spirit of St. Louis.
This gift came from my dear friend Gregg Maryniak, who was then hoping to provide the inspiration needed for me to finish my pilot's license (which I had started and stopped three times for lack of money and/or time). And it worked. I did complete my license, but the inspiration didn't stop there.

Before I read
Spirit
, I'd always believed that Lindbergh woke up one day and decided to head east, crossing the Atlantic on a whim. I had no idea that he made his famous flight to win the Orteig Prize—a $25,000 prize for the first person to fly solo from Paris to New York (or vice versa). Nor did I know what extraordinary leverage such competitions could provide. In this case, cumulatively, nine teams spent $400,000 trying to win Raymond Orteig's purse. That's sixteenfold leverage. And Orteig didn't pay one cent to the losers: instead his incentive-based mechanism automatically backed Lindbergh, who was, by most accounts, the least qualified of all the entrants. Even better, the resulting media frenzy created so much public excitement that an entire industry was launched. It was an incentive prize that led to today's $300 billion global aviation market.
¹

By the time I finished reading
The Spirit of St. Louis
, the concept of an incentive prize for the “demonstration of a suborbital, private, fully reusable spaceship” had formed in my mind. Not knowing who my “Orteig” would be, I wrote “ ‘X' PRIZE” in the margin of the book. The letter X was a variable, a placeholder, to be replaced with the name
of the person or company that put up the $10 million purse. How I decided on $10 million as the purse size, raised the money, and created the rules, I'll get to shortly. My first step, after realizing that an incentive prize might help me fulfill my personal moonshot, was to learn everything I could about prizes, their history, and how and why they worked.

Orteig didn't invent incentive prizes. Three centuries before Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic by plane, the British Parliament wanted some help crossing the Atlantic by ship. In 1714, the £20,000 Longitude Prize was offered to the first person to accurately measure longitude at sea. It worked. In 1765, horologist John Harrison pulled it off, but beyond opening the oceans to navigation, this competition brought incentive prizes—as a method for driving innovation—into the public eye.

The idea spread quickly. In 1795, for example, Napoléon I offered a 12,000-franc prize for a method of food preservation to help feed his army on its long march into Russia. The winner, Nicolas Appert, a French candy maker, established the basic method of canning, still in use today.
²
In 1823 the French government offered another prize, this one a 6,000-franc purse for the development of a large-scale commercial hydraulic turbine. The winning design helped power the burgeoning textile industry. Other prizes have driven breakthroughs in transportation, chemistry, and health care.
³
“Historically, for both royalty and industrialists, incentive prizes have long been a tool for fostering innovation,” says Deloitte Consulting Principal Marcus Shingles. “But it is only now that these competitions are beginning to reach their prime. In our hyperconnected world, with the maturation of social media and the explosion of crowdsourcing capabilities, our ability to design and utilize these prizes to drive breakthroughs has never been stronger.”
⁴

The success of these competitions stems from a few underlying
principles. First and foremost, large incentive prizes raise the visibility of a particular challenge, attracting innovators and nontraditional thinkers from around the globe. These competitions also help foster the belief that a given challenge is in fact solvable. Considering what we know about cognitive biases, this is no small detail. Before the Ansari XPRIZE, few investors seriously considered the market for commercial human space flight; it was assumed to be the sole province of governments. Afterwards, a half-dozen companies formed, well over $1 billion was invested, and hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of tickets to space have been sold.
⁵

Second, in areas where market failures have hindered investment or entrenched incumbents have prevented progress, prizes break bottlenecks. By creating a race with a large cash payout, these competitions attract new forms of money to the problem area. Rather than backing a potential team solely for the investment opportunity, corporate sponsors and benefactors support a team for the publicity. Consider that every year, sponsors spend $45 billion backing teams whose sole purpose is to move different-sized and -shaped balls up and down fields.
⁶
In a very similar fashion, corporations can now support teams trying to solve grand challenges.

Corporate Sports Sponsorship by Category

Big Business: Corporate Sports Sponsorships

Source:
http://www.sportsbusinessdaily.com
,
http://www.bizofbaseball.com
,
www.deloitte.com