Driving Strategic Outcomes Through Gamification

I will be honest, I’m not a big fan of gamification for gamification sake…. But you can use gamification to drive engagement. But you need to think about outcomes and what you are doing to drive those outcomes before just adding a “most active users” widget on your community page. Here are some subtle, yet impactful things you can do to drive engagement in your community by rewarding good behavior. Badges We have nine technical institutes that are essentially their own membership organizations. You can join one free with the Society membership, choose multiple (and pay for it), or just join the institute. We wanted to highlight the membership in each of these technical disciplines, so I added a special badge to display on the member’s profile. The outcome we were hoping for was awareness and increased institute membership. I received an email from a member this week who had joined an institute and was wondering when the badge would appear in his profile. He wanted other members to recognize him as being part of that segment of membership. This was exactly the outcome we were trying to drive. You join to get the badge. I love to see in real time how community strategy drives membership. Win number one for this gamification strategy. Vendor Visits I watched a fantastic session at Higher Logic’s SuperForum from Brett Wangman. You can view the recording here. You may need to register and join the community first here. Brett talked about how he set up an event community and separate microsites for sponsors. He talked explicitly about how associations can make sponsors more inclined to sponsor your virtual events. Something I know most of us in the association world are struggling with. He set up microsites for sponsors and created gamification for members to visit the pages and grab a code to submit to win prizes. What a brilliant idea. It’s fun and engaging for members while driving outcomes for partners because they now have increased access to attendees. If your hosting an online event and want to use Higher Logic as a platform, his session is a must watch. He goes into much more detail than I can here (and I’m sure you would rather here it from him). Likes The Higher Logic platform previously (and I think still does) defaults to a “recommend” button to “like” a post. The language behind recommend means you have some authoritative reason to “recommend” the post. I manage an online community for civil engineers. They don’t feel like they can recommend something unless they are an expert in the field. I think members of most professional communities feel the same way. The amazing Shannon Emery challenged the language of the button in the HUG community and switched the language to “like.” She saw a huge increase in engagement with the button. This is a super small tweak! But it shows members that even though members may not be able to add value to the thread and contribute, they appreciate the post. As an ’88 baby who was one of the first Facebook users, I had advocated for this change and quickly changed our community as well. We have seen an increase in “likes” which makes the community seem more vibrant and gives you better metrics for who is consuming community content and finding it valuable. At the core of this issue, is imposter syndrome. Some professions or people even feel like they need to be an “expert” to engage in community. As community professionals we need to welcome new members and make them feel like they have belonging. They are there to learn and grow and the community is there to help them do that. “Likes” gives new members a way to engage, learn, and grow. You can recognize these members through automation to recognize their participation even though they didn’t yet feel like they could contribute to the conversation. “Likes” can be the first step in your onboarding process to grow these members into community leaders and experts. In Conclusion There is a time and a place for gamification, but you need to be strategic in what type of activity you intend for it to drive and how that will positively impact your community. Moving into the virtual event space, opens new doors for creative and innovative gamification strategies. I would be interested to hear how you are utilizing gamification in our new digital landscape. Please share them in the comment section below.