How do you incentivize your community? | Experts’ RoundUp
By: Ankita Tripathi
Tags: Community Management, Community Manager, Community, Developer Relations, Community Engagement

Image by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

Doesn’t “incentivising” sound more like “bribing”? Like, I will bribe you to be active on my page or to collaborate with me for goodies, money, or fame? 😁

Yes, the exact way influencers on Instagram give away products for free to their followers for re-sharing their stories or commenting on their pictures. It is the same analogy we follow while keeping our people active in the groups. 📜

But how far does incentivising your business, with money, takes you?

Does it help you with a short term scaling or takes you to a longer run?

Incentivising your community/business by giveaways for members or offering them any monetary gift doesn’t last long. Even if once you do so, the expectations amongst members increases and the work just revolves around “how much next”! And surely, you don’t want that. Communities are all about like-minded people who resonate with you and your ideas, who believe in the same ideologies, and who clearly know the community’s intentions.

So, what better ways to incentivize the community to bring more engagement and resources?

Let’s See: 🤓

“How to incentivize your community?”

Who doesn’t like recognition or appreciation for the hard work they put in any work? Even running for marathons feels good at the end when you are appreciated for your effort with a medal. And managing a community is no less than handling a marathon where runners curiously await for something new and demand appreciation at some point.

Owing to the same concern, Chitra HL raised this question as she wanted to incentivize her community group which was seeing the wrath of “too many members but too less engagement.”

The question indeed broke through all the chants and Arbab Usmani wrote how important it is to empathize with your community members. Don’t lure them with monetary pleasures instead recognize and make them stand out from the crowd. Any member would love to hear his name out on the top of 400 members to just feel how important his/her contributions have stayed. Following the line, Arkodyuti Saha, Suhas Motwani, Rakesh Sidana, felt the same. They believed the greatest incentive that a community manager can provide his/her fellow community members is a healthy connection. Network them well in the groups you think they might excel. No gold coins are worth more than the gold connections they build on this platform. Ankita Mishra, who is currently handling the community at Progate had wonderful ideas and applications to incentivize her members. They either praise the people on the group publically or give them goodies that push them to work harder and better. Not only this but ironing out success stories of such members and then publishing it has its own positive effects. Learning from their stories, other members keep getting better at their performance ratios. Abhishek Mishra had similar analogies of recognizing the members on the group by calling them out as the “Top Contributor of the Week”. Apart from adding value, they conduct weekly quizzes or tests to parse out the significant members and give them certificates of excellence. Though, they did try providing PayTm cash initially but gracefully ditched the idea as it revolved more around money than the whole purpose. Asha Chaudhry, who probably owes the most experience in the field, believes in raising up the glass of achievements high and celebrating. She quoted, “The best way to acknowledge your members is to celebrate them. You can reward them digitally with badges, points (gamification), titles, etc. If you have brands collaborating with you then you can reward the power users by giving them the privilege to review their products or the opportunity to become a brand ambassador or give them special invites to certain events. Ideally one need not incentivize users — they should see enough value in being a part of the community. If your community is inclusive and they feel that they belong — they don’t need to be incentivized. But yes, please acknowledge and celebrate them.” Who wouldn’t agree to this processed thought here? Mithun Shetty, raised the bar with his high quotient incentivized knowledge areas. He wrote, “In terms of incentivization, so far we’ve basically focused on non-materialistic motivators like an acknowledgment of our best & most active members for their contributions. We’re now beginning to explore the possibility of a formalized community influencer/leadership program to drive one of our key objectives for the coming year which is professional learning circles fuelled through UGC (both digital & offline). This is still in the early stages of member research.

But yeah, it all boils down to what your objective is. You might want to go one level deeper than “to motivate users to participate/contribute”. Ask yourself why do you want them to contribute (what will these contributions achieve?) And how do you want them to contribute ( your culture, some traditions, group etiquettes, etc).

With so many ideas and value-added responses, we hope you get a fair idea of what is more important. We, at Community Folks, already feel incentivized with the amount of warmth and engagement each member invests.

Hope so you know how to incentivize your members now.