What values do you want to see in your community? How can you incentivize value-driven engagement? Look no further; there is an easy way to do it, we have tested it, and the feedback we received is positive. Say goodbye to the good old social contracts and say hello to value-driven incentivization.
A community designer or manager's sweetest dream is creating a community with a lot of engagement. Engagement means sharing knowledge, building on top of learning, discussion, and interaction leading to deeper understanding or simply relationship-building among other members. These are all the most wanted functions of a community, and the designers/managers' utmost job is to create a fertile environment that enables sweet sweet engagement.
Remember XP points? According to Wikipedia, experience points (abbreviated as XP) is a unit of measurement used in video games to quantify a player character's life experience and progression through the game. It keeps the player motivated and enables the character to reach new levels to unlock new abilities, locations, objects, and quests.
For the second cohort of The Learning Community, we have partnered with a team of no-code developers to create a Slack Bot that captures emoji reactions a slack post receives and displays it in our "for admins eyes only" Airtable score list. Each emoji is worth one point, and points are only earned when an emoji is given to their post from another member.
This system enables us to:
👉 See which member is most engaged according to their XP points
👉 Spot which post got the most reaction
👉 Gamify incentivization to keep engagement fun
Members can also earn points by attending the live zoom sessions, but that's another story to be captured in another journal.
The dilemma we had right now was: should we count ALL emoji reactions as XP or posts representing a certain kind of behavior? At this point in our design process, I got a brilliant idea, and the sun literally started to shine brighter.
Why not design our icons as emojis on Slack representing the three most essential values we encourage to see among members?