When Looking for Communication & Marketing Solutions, Are You Quirky Enough?

Quirky is the name of new company that builds products dreamed up by amateur inventors.

Slap-dash doodlers from around the world are invited by Quirky to send ideas for overcoming common challenges and problems—no matter how strange, weird or fantastic those ideas might be.

Every week, the Quirky community votes on the best ideas. The winners are sent on to engineers, who turn them into real products.

Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor at MIT, calls this new way of coming up with solutions to real problems “combinatorial innovation.”

“There are tons of creative ideas out there," he said. "The greatest thing about digital technology is that it’s easier than ever to get lots of eyeballs looking at our biggest problems.”

What does this have to do with non-profit groups?

When we are faced with communication and marketing challenges, we usually turn to the same people and places to find answers—people just like us.

This can work, but it also can be limiting. Since we are only asking insiders, we can tend to end up with only inside answers. 

The beauty of Quirky is that solutions to problems come from different and unexpected places, giving us different and unexpected answers.

Being outsiders, they can see things in fresh, new ways—ways we might never think of.

To use a hockey analogy, by inviting different people to take shots we would not only get more shots on goal, we would get shots from unexpected shooters and surprising angles.

I recently did a version of Quirky when I invited the Executive Director of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra to speak to a group of church communicators. 

At first glance, we have little in common. But we both face the same challenges of reaching out to new audiences with old messages. Our time together was inspiring and informative.  

Social media is a big help in this area. When faced with a communication or marketing challenge, we can use it to relay a request to thousands of people. Who knows what kind of answers we might get, and from where?

We just have to be quirky enough to ask.

Click here to read Finding the Next Edison, an article about Quirky from Atlantic Online.