Setting up a reward system for your community members goes a long way in building community engagement. These rewards can incentivize them to become active participants in the discussions and events that you conduct. Most community rewards are extrinsic. They include things like badges, points and community coins.
These incentives are really important in driving growth and engagement. Sam Altman thinks so too:
With communities, setting incentives requires carefully planning around your metrics. Here are the five most important things to incentivize on:
1) Invited a friend (growth)
2) Attended an event (engagement)
3) 5 upvotes on a forum post (engagement, any lesser than 5 can be easily manipulated)
4) 5 upvotes on content (engagement, any lesser than 5 can be easily manipulated)
5) Visiting streaks (engagement, converts monthly or weekly users into daily active users)
We actually started our incentivization experiments on Discord itself. Here's a comment on our YouTube Discord tutorial:
We used a bot on Discord called UnbelievaBoat, and set up every new user with 1,000 coins. People could send each other coins and check their balance, but that was about it. You didn't have a shop channel where you could redeem the coins and the coins couldn't be given out based on any actions (coins had to be given manually to every user, which is painful). There is so much more you can do with a smartly designed coin system.
💡Graphy Community Platform solves the incentivization problem with a full fledged coins system. Not only can coins be automatically given based on certain actions (inviting new members, or likes on a post, or attending events), you can also let your users spend their coins in your shop channel!
Incentives are powerful when it comes to improving your viral factor (k), and all your ratio metrics. Most importantly, it improves shop conversions because you can give your members a discount if they hold some coins on products that cost money.
💡One drawback with Graphy' shop system is that it only supports Stripe and Razorpay as payment gateways for now.
What’s in it for us?
If someone is doing something or might agree to help you do something that can benefit your community, and they have no intrinsic motivation or need to do so, give them an incentive for the same.
There's nothing wrong in doing so.
Everybody cares about what's in it for themselves. You know that's the case because it's been popularly termed WIIFM since the phrase is so commonly thrown around.
This can be a bad idea if you're offering an incentive to someone in exchange for bad behavior or turning a blind eye towards such behavior.
Doing people favors without asking for anything in return (immediately), giving people gifts even before they helped you are great ways to start a relationship with someone on a good foot.
It helps you reinforce those good behaviors through Pavlovian conditioning. And people are naturally indebted to return favors.
This is why you should consciously make an effort to reward your community members with the right incentives, if you’re looking to increase community engagement. All you need to do is figure out which strategy would work best with your people. But, why do it alone, when we’re here? To talk to us, click here.
