From Points to Badges: Mastering Engagement by Gamification in Online Communities
You've tackled the technical part of building a community – setting up the platform and creating the space for users to connect and interact.
But now comes the tricky part you haven't thought of. How to activate your members and keep them engaged?
Gamification might be the answer.
It's not just about entertainment. It's about building stronger community bonds and driving long-term engagement through game elements, challenges and the reward system.
Keep reading to discover how to apply gamification community engagement and why it should be an essential part of your customer engagement plan.
What is gamification?
Gamification refers to using game-like elements in non-game contexts such as education, marketing or community management to increase user engagement and motivate users to complete their tasks.
This can be done by incorporating features such as points, badges, leaderboards, challenges, rewards and many others. Gamification taps into intrinsic motivation like competition, achievement and collaboration.
It has many benefits, but the most significant ones are improving user experience and increasing participation and engagement rate in your online community.
Gamification in online communities
The most common examples of gamification in a community setting that can be found from the early years of online forums are badges and trust scores. Successful online communities have the common elements of a successful gamification strategy.
These are really simple to implement and highly effective in terms of the outcome.
Badges give a visual cue about the specialty of the community member. Considering that badges are awarded when a member achieves something significant in the community, these badges become aspirational and members work towards getting them.
Other members of the community recognize that the badge-holder has been a quality contributor to the community and get motivated by their peers. When defining these badges ensure that they reflect your brand guidelines and are geared towards the goals of the community.
Another feature worth mentioning are leaderboards. They come in handy if you organize any type of challenge or competition and want to promote active participation. The leaderboards can update in real time providing members the insight into their performance.
Devising gamification for community engagement
One important element of gamification, i.e., rewards must not be solely treated as incentives for transactional activities. Rewards must be given to recognize the contribution and valuable social behavior – it could be reputation scores, badges, or anything else. Also, it is great to add a personal and human touch whenever rewards are distributed.
When designing a gamification plan it'd be worthy to note that one system can't satisfy all the members. So, community managers must think about how gamification can serve the larger goal of the community. Gamification should be designed to acknowledge valuable contributions to the community and commitment to betterment.
Consider adding a gamification element that can encourage users to build connections with others and accomplish a target via group activity. This results in stronger and complex networks in a community. The more complex the networks are in a community, the better the networking.
A healthy competition between community members can bring in greater value for the entire community. When competition is leveraged to create teams, acquire knowledge and all are motivated to reach an agreed outcome, competition can foster community-building.
Points to ponder for community managers
The community managers are the architects of community success. They ensure that the members are well-equipped to contribute to the community, all the incentives are configured correctly, and the right community engagement tactics are deployed to reach business goals. Of course, this includes the gamification techniques as well.
Hence, a community manager must get the fundamental knowledge of the gamification for successful implementation:
- Member behavior. The community manager must have intimate knowledge of the members, their goals, the value they get from the community along the common elements that bind the members together. When the motivation of the members is clear, your gamification plan will have a higher chance of getting aligned for success.
- Reachable goals. The larger plan is to incentivize the users to attain the goals. If the goals are complex and look far-fetched, it can demotivate and cause frustration. So, the goals that a customer is required to achieve must be set in such a way, that they would be able to reach different levels in a reasonable manner.
Finally, make sure that the gamification plan is designed to reflect your brand and completely integrated with the community platform, processes as well as the customer journey.
If you're into community management, don't forget to check out our guide on community moderation which will help you create a safe space for community members to express themselves.
Driving community engagement with gamification
Gamification is for sure one of the best ways to improve online community engagement but only if you use the right gamification strategies. Here are some ideas:
Choose the right platform
The easiest way for implementing gamification is to use a dedicated community website builder that comes with built-in gamification elements.
Bettermode is an intuitive and user-friendly platform based on the drag-and-drop principle. It lets you build a professionally-looking community quickly and easily, even if you don't have any coding experience.
It comes with plenty of customizable templates for different types of communities. Here are some of them:
You can use this template to build a self-service support portal and knowledge base at once. Unlike static customer service websites, our platform encourages users to communicate with each other via user forums. There's also an interactive article rating system where people can rate the most useful articles to help other users.
Help center platform & Community engagement hub
This community template is ideal for those who want to build a customer self-service portal that motivates users to interact with each other, ask questions and provide answers.
It contains interactive gamification elements such as avatars and leaderboards. For more examples, check out this article on building self-service for SaaS.
Who says that work collaboration platforms have to be boring? Bettermode lets you build thriving online communities suitable for different professions, knowledge sharing and collaboration on various projects.
All Bettermode community website templates come with plenty of integrations, including:
- Slack and Discord for communication and collaboration
- HotJar and Mixpanel for analyzing user behavior
- Ticket-management systems like Jira
- Cookie consent manager
If you're not sure how to choose the right platform, take a look at this community platform checklist.
Delivering value with gamification
When you have integrated your product with the community, you have a great avenue for awarding points to users who are successfully using different features of your product. You can define badges such as "fast-learner" to those who quickly explore most of the product features.
Bettermode community engagement platform comes with many unique gamification elements. When it comes to badges, you can choose one of our pre-made badges or create new ones from scratch. You can add the badge's name, color and style.
Also, it's possible to automate some of the most popular badges. For example, you can set the "New member" badge to automatically appear next to new users' names for the first 14 days.
Social sharing
You can also reward the members for sharing the community content on social media. This gives them quality content to share with their network as well as get points. That way, you can turn your community members into brand ambassadors who will help you attract more people from your target audience.
If you want to stay away from social media giants like Instagram and Facebook, but would still like to implement that familiar interface people are used to, we've got you covered. Our community website builder comes with a variety of templates, some of which resemble that familiar social feed:
Basebook is a great option for anyone who is looking for an alternative to Facebook groups. This template is similar to Facebook, just much more flexible and customizable. It promotes social interaction through features like comments, reactions and private messaging.
Bettergram is a platform for sharing visual content, ideal for those who are looking for an Instagram alternative, that's private and safer. It's a great option for visual storytelling, sharing user-generated content and organizing photo contests.
You want to boost user interaction by inviting your audience to tweet, but at the same time, you want to avoid distractions on Twitter and other brands who are competing for users' attention?
We've got you covered. Try out BetterX, a community platform template that's similar to X, but provides you with full control over user data and analytics.
Integrating with loyalty programs
You can integrate community activities with your customer loyalty program. This ensures that apart from influencing the shopping behavior and your customers would get rewarded for their contribution to the digital space.
Check out this article on audience vs community to learn the right engagement techniques that will help you transform your website visitors into loyal and engaged community members.
Staying connected with customers
In the current age, every consumer is getting bombarded with advertising messages and the attention span has become very fragile. Hence, in a highly competitive arena, keep users engaged via gamification and stay on top of their minds.
Giving control
Although you are facilitating the discussions and managing the community as the owner, the community is not about your brand – it is about your customers and members. So, when you define the gamification rules, ensure that the participants are getting value and they must realize that they are in control.
Being consistent
The gamification plan should have an ongoing engagement. This ensures that the momentum is not lost and there is always something new for the community members to achieve and get more value.
Conclusion
We hope that this article provided you with inspiration and practical ideas on how to engage members of your community.
The good news is that you don't have to get a separate engagement tool as our community platform has everything you need to activate your members and enhance user engagement.
From built-in features such as badges and leaderboards to live chat and an interface that resembles social media communities, Bettermode has all you need to create a thriving community your members will love.
Try it for free and see why so many brands use our community portals.
This article was originally published on January 22nd, 2020, and was updated on December 1st, 2024.
FAQs
What is an online virtual community?
An online virtual community is a dedicated space where people can interact, engage, ask questions, share useful resources and communicate with a brand or with each other. Online communities can be used for different purposes from increasing brand awareness and providing customer support to selling online courses, memberships and other digital products.
What is a community building platform?
A community building platform or simply put community builder is a tool that allows you to create and host your online community. Those tools are often based on the drag-and-drop principle and don't require much technical knowledge. Online community platform builders differ from traditional website builders because they provide specific community features such as chat, direct messaging, comments and reactions to posts, etc, with the goal of boosting engagement and connection among community members.
How to create a community platform?
The fastest and easiest way to create a community platform is to use a community builder like Bettermode. You can either create an online community from scratch or use one of our templates that can be edited and customized. Of course, you can also add your own brand.
Which is the best platform to build a community?
Bettermode is the best online community platform due to its intuitive and user-friendly interface as well as advanced community features. Coding skills and technical knowledge are not required for creating online communities. There are also plenty of templates to choose from for different types of online communities: from collaboration and knowledge sharing to paid membership communities.
