We had a huge success in the usabililty lab a couple weeks ago around motivating and rewarding participation in an online community. We were testing paper prototypes of a large new site. Our initial plan not only completely failed to motivate people to participate, it actually caused them to want NOT to participate.
Let me back up. Our client asked us for a proposal for an initiative to produce user-generated content. Great. We came back with something really REALLY cool (I'll say more when I can). The feeling was that people would want participate, just because the place is going to be cool (really REALLY cool), and to hedge our bets and ensure we'd see some very high-quality content, we suggested running a contest. The grand prize was going to be big, even on the order of a tricked-out vintage car.
We thought this was reasonable. Of course participation has its own rewards, but let's go ahead and make sure at least some people will invest some serious energy.
And we were wrong. In such a good way.
Not only did people not respond positively to the contest idea, the handful who acknowledged it expressed suspicion... and even revulsion. The overall response was more or less, "A contest? What are they trying to get from me?"
Here's the reason this result was so positive: People were in fact motivated to participate--not by the contest but by the social rewards that surrounded participation.
We killed the contest and focused on increasing the social rewards of participation. A great example of user-centered design in a community context: Usability lab feedback redirected a major aspect of site strategy and, I'm pretty certain, saved us. (Is anyone else out there testing prototypes of community sites with users? I'd love to hear about it.)
I just saw a blog post from Best Engaging Communities about best practices for motivating community participants. The post describes a KM project which motivated knowledge-holders to "leave a legacy." It's a great idea, because it reaches just the right people (folks nearing retirement) with just the right message: Your time here was meaningful. I believe someone in the leadership development world wrote a paper about career stages, and the mentorship stage is a critical late-career bit.
And the post was right also about not paying participants. Likewise, we saw very clearly that the answer isn't to run a contest. Big prizes are probably even less motivating than that $20 Starbucks card.
Extrinsic motivators don't work for community participation any more than they do for anything else. What does work? Social rewards. So if you want to motivate people to participate in your community, focus on building a rich social experience around participation. You could even say the richer the social experience, the more motivated participants will be.
Here are some ways to do that. I'm sure there are many more:
- Provide a flexible public profile space people can customize to present themselves as they want to be known. Do better than photo, location, bio.
- Provide a data-rich private dashboard for people to monitor the activity they care about, especially information about how other people are interacting with their contributions. Show views, downloads, # of comments or replies, times favorited, overall rank, etc.
- Flag new stuff. Make it easy to see the activity that matters to the individual.
- Add thumbnails where people add content. Humanize the text.
- Promote a social contract and give the community the ability to rally around it. Let users comment on your terms of use.
- "Introduce" people with things in common.
- Let people choose whom to trust how much.
There are a million examples. The real revolution, from the perspective of understandably-nervous launchers of new community sites, is to focus energy on developing sociability, and to say no to the temptation to hedge your bets.
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