Crowdsourcing. AKA: Innocent people doing your dirty work.

You know you’re in a crowdsourcing panel at SXSW when the panel admits that they crowd sourced all of the content for their presentation that day.

And that’s exactly what happened at “Crowdsourcing Innovative Social Change.”

But who can blame them? There are individuals out there who just want to be heard, and crowdsourcing is a great way to give them a voice while getting what you need for your organization. Usually for free.

Enter non-profit.

For non-profit organizations, crowdsourcing can be a savior. Typically, there are two things non-profits lack: time and money. Crowdsourcing lets non-profits quickly solicit ideas they can implement without having to pay full-time employees for their concepting time. Plus, non-profits can tap a wider audience than their lean, mean staff currently employs.

But, how does this work for, say, ad agencies? Agencies pay a creative staff to generate ideas, content, art, copy. How can an ad agency justify paying full-time employees who in turn just outsource the creative to the world and call it a day? Is user-generated content just a cop-out; an excuse for creatives to simply rely on the public to dictate the voice of their brand? Creatives are supposedly experts in their field, so why would they place such responsibility in the hands of amateurs?

Non-profits just may have the answer ad agencies are looking for.

The most successful cases of crowdsourcing implement a “hybrid model.” This model relies on a mix of both experts and the general public. The experts maintain control of the content, but simply filter the ideas from various people, taking the best of the best. 80% of an idea here combined with 20% of an idea there, add 5% from this person and you’ve got a relatively original, diversified and inexpensive solution to your organization’s needs. And as panelist Kari Saratovsky says, “Diversity leads to better answers.”

And better answers are exactly what non-profits want in order to get more of what they need: time and money.