I saw a great example today where a company had an event going on worldwide and usually a business would create local events in various areas to help celebrate it. As you can imagine, this costs money having to hire and potentially renting out spaces where it simply limits how many places you can realistically actually setup an event. This strategy was different. The company instead offered fans of their product who was willing to be an ambassador of sort in organizing events like a meetup through their official apps. They then provide the organizers with things such as digital coupons people can scan and essentially get rewarded as if they were at the events themselves. It saves the company so much money this way while still having the impact they desired.
It’s a great example of empowering your community to help do the work for you by rewarding them to take initiative on something they probably love to do anyways. Of course there are risks that the people volunteering won’t actually show up since it’s not exactly a contract job as an example. But when you are dealing with people are super passionate about your products they will most likely go out of their way to try and make everything great.
Of course, here we are talking about simple things versus expecting say fans to setup a huge stage and all as if it’s a concert as an example. But this should always be an option for companies that operate globally, I think.