Rewarding Insight Community Members
When Insight Community Members feel their contributions are recognised and rewarded, they are more likely to engage meaningfully with activities and provide considered responses, creating more value for the Community. If Members feel overlooked or poorly rewarded, their participation levels will be low. Value exchange (meaning that Community participation is beneficial for both the brands and Members) is often the difference between success and failure.
A Community’s value exchange involves both rewards (which can be extrinsic or intrinsic) and recognition:
- Extrinsic rewards – things like monetary incentives in the form of cash or vouchers, prize draw entries or points schemes.
- Intrinsic rewards – the motivation to contribute and participate which comes from recognition by other Community Members – from likes, comments etc. – or from the brand, in the form of getting feedback on how your participation is having an influence.
- Recognition – which can be internal, within the Community, or external, for example recognition by the brand that participation has been helpful.
Here are our recommendations when to comes to recognising and rewarding Members:
Rewards
Rewards are a really important element of a Community’s engagement strategy and often come in the form of vouchers, charity donations or prize draw entries, which provide extrinsic motivation. Rewards are always one of the reasons for joining a Community cited by Members in our annual Member Satisfaction surveys.
These rewards should be gauged according to the audience. If you have a Community of high-income B2B decision makers, for instance, they might find the idea of a prize draw entries uninteresting and charity donations might work better. Whereas a Community of young tech users could be better incentivised by Apple or Android Store vouchers.
Recognition
As a Member settles into the Community, the emphasis turns to recognition of the value they bring to it. The desire for recognition is a deeply human one which can act as a strong intrinsic motivation to continue taking part.
In an Insight Community, recognition comes in two forms. There’s internal recognition and status within the Community, which usually takes the form of badges, points and membership levels. The more you contribute, and the more useful your contributions, the more of these you automatically unlock. Peer recognition in the form of likes and comments can also be important too, especially for younger Members. In our research with Gen Z, respondents told us that recognition by their peers was an important motivator; this led to us creating a range of ‘reactions’ in our Community platform, beyond ‘likes’ alone.
The other form of recognition is external recognition – acknowledgement of the quality of contributions from the moderators or client team. This can be very valuable too and build motivation across the entire Community rather than an individual. For instance, a newsletter which tells Members about the praise given to the Community by end users, or about decisions taken or products launched on the back of it, will be very interesting to people who’ve been involved in activities.
Intrinsic motivation is one of the strongest advantages an Insight Community has over traditional research solutions. A stand-alone survey provides very limited intrinsic motivation. There’s rarely ever any follow-up, there’s no social context, so you’re detached from any consequence of your answers. But in an Insight Community, every task you complete builds your connection to the Community and your status within it. It can be an exceptionally powerful tool for keeping people engaged.
How might recognitions and rewards work together in practice?
Let’s use a real-life example:
Emily joins an Insight Community for a FMCG brand. During onboarding she completes her profile questionnaire and welcome task and gets a “profile completed” badge, as well as her first Community points.
Soon she’s collected more badges, for activity like; the completion of ten tasks, doing a week of diary study tasks.
A few months in and Emily’s activity level is high enough that she gets entered into the monthly prize draw and wins one of the minor prizes (and a Prize Winner badge, of course.) A user from the brand has liked her comments and thanked her for providing detailed answers. She also appreciated reading in the Community newsletter that a product idea she helped test has been approved for development next year. She’s been on a Community Zoom chat with the brand’s CEO, who talked about how helpful the Insight Community had been and dropped some hints about an upcoming promotion.
She’s been cashing in her points to take her family out for dinner. She’s only 200 or so points away from upgrading her Member status and getting onto the Community’s product preview perk, where she’ll get exclusive early looks at new lines.
The impact: Emily knows that her contributions are recognised and rewarded. Her motivation is high, she feels valued and rewarded, and she’s usually one of the first to take part in new tasks. This is all down to a well-designed value exchange.
About the author
Lucy Alexander is Community Technical Lead at STRAT7 Researchbods, where she champions the voice of community members to help ensure we deliver an engaging and motivating experience. Lucy brings almost 10 years of experience in online communities, with a focus on improving the member experience and shaping platform development around their needs.
