Taskfunding challenge: How to set values for tasks

Photo by Igor Ovsyannykov on Unsplash

In this series of posts I want to talk about the business model challenges that I have been/am currently working through with the development of Taskfundr.


All tasks are not equal

Well I think this is probably pretty obvious but yes all tasks do not carry the same value. Getting on a bus and going to visit a store the other side of town to "check in" absolutely merits a higher reward than simply sharing a pre-written tweet.


So how do you value the tasks?

One of the easiest to ballpark is video content. At least we can use the current market rates of CPCV (cost-per-completed-view). This is fine, but in general advertising video rates are set based on "push" marketing e.g. ads showing up before the thing you really wanted to watch, or cropping up in a social stream.

With taskfunding the viewer is "pulling" the content and is openly consuming it. The likelihood too is that the style of video will have far more emotional "value" too.

In fact the same can probably be said about all tasks performed in taskfunding, as the taskfunder is volunteering to do the tasks. This is because they know that there is either a) a kick-back for them or b) they are raising value for something they believe in.

So how much is visiting a company to "check in" worth or how much is uploading an image of the user holding a candle worth?


The Campaign Designer

Looking into this challenge has driven the thinking behind one of the platforms strongest assets - the Campaign Designer. Below is a screen grab of a section (bear in mind this is in prototype form just using Bootstrap styling).

Immersify Campaign Designer

The reality is that when creating a campaign the following are all true:

  • Angels all have different reasons and expectations of ROI.
  • Both Recipients and Angels will have different values for each task themselves e.g. costs per acquisition will vary per campaign, really well designed video may have higher perceived value etc.
  • Taskfunders will not do lots and lots of tasks for very little incentive.
  • The platform must be able to afford to deliver the tasks.

So the beauty of the Campaign Designer is that it facilitates both Angels and Recipients into an actual discussion about how best to create the campaign for mutual benefit.

This has huge amounts of benefit across many of the challenges I have been talking about in this series and allows flexibility and a greater degree of control over the individuals creativity to design the most optimised campaigns.

It also allows some simple control mechanisms to set base prices for the platform to not come up against some nasty unseen operational costs.

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To conclude

This has been one of the most hair-pulling, whiteboard scribbling, spreadsheet hacking problems to solve to date as well as being one of the most beneficial in terms of providing an answer to many of the other issues faced.

The main reason for the headaches is that I believe it is critical to allow people freedom to design their campaigns in the way that fits their own needs best, as well as allowing the platform to set financial limits. Sort of building a framework that can be flexible for many parties.

Finally looking at this problem from many different angles has helped to close the gap in setting the equilibrium for a campaign. This is what I think is the holy grail of campaigns - where all three user groups (The Angels, The Recipients & The Taskfunders) not only all gets back an equivalent to what they put in, but ideally looking at ways to boost each party's returns for the perfect Win Win Win.

Until next time! …

If you are interested in any of the ideas that I have talked about or want to get in touch about helping, launching a campaign etc then send me a tweet @jimhilluk.