If members feel their activities are recognised and rewarding, they will go above and beyond in providing detailed responses to tasks and create more value for the community. If they feel overlooked or poorly rewarded, their participation levels will be low. Value exchange is often the difference between success and failure, so here are our top tips:
This is your first chance to make a good impression. Get members excited about joining your community and that participation will be both enjoyable, rewarded and will make an impact. It can be tricky to balance your need for useful data with a quick and easy onboarding process, but once aboard, let your new members create a profile, share their first post and earn their first points or rewards.
They say success is what you do repeatedly and so reinforcing positive behaviour is a key part of your value exchange. You want a member to be active, carry out a wide range of tasks and interact with other members. And you want them to do this on a continuous basis. When you are starting to think about your value exchange, you need to plan long-term and identify what behaviours you want to reward outside of doing research tasks.
Perhaps the quickest and easiest way to reinforce positive actions is just by popping up and highlighting activity, reacting to member comments and feeding back when someone is giving a great answer early on. This gives a very clear indication of the sort of activity you’re looking for. We would generally advise against having ‘likes’ or ‘upvotes’ as a public lack of recognition can be demotivating to a member.
"A little bit of encouragement from your team can go a long way. If you engage regularly, your member will too!" Christina Rader, Community Executive
An easy way to show progress. When you have badges or levels of membership, it’s all about selling the journey to new members. Badges need to feel obtainable but earnt. The different levels, rewards & how to earn them need to be understandable at a glance. Give out your first badge early to reduce churn in new members.
A great tool for long-term communities. Getting the ratio of points to prizes right can be a little tricky. There’s a balancing act between ensuring that some rewards are given out early (so members don’t feel like they need to jump through too many hoops to be rewarded) whilst also saving some rewards for long-term members. We often draw inspiration from video games when it comes to points. Typically in video games the first few levels teach you how to play the game and they give you more rewards/points to get you to continue playing. After this you’ll just get a standard amount of points for the next few levels, until the levels get harder and the rewards go up.
Match the reward to your audience for the best results. If you have a community of high-income B2B decision makers, for example, they might find the idea of saving points for prize-draw entries to be a little beneath them – and charity donations will work better. Whereas a community of young tech users could be better incentivised by Apple or Android Store vouchers. When it comes to rewards most often you’ll want a mix of different incentives to suit different people. Oh and don’t be afraid to ask your community what sorts of rewards they’d like!
