Fostering engagement in your community with gamification
As the founder of the Wannabe Entrepreneur (WBE) Community, I am excited to share the success of our gamification efforts to increase engagement among our members. The WBE community is a group of indie makers who are working to turn their ideas into businesses. Our mission is to provide support and accountability to our members as they work on their projects.
Over the years, I've tried multiple approaches to increase engagement within the community, and I'd like to share four of the most successful methods we've implemented.
1) Community Events
One of the key ways we've increased engagement within the WBE community is through our online events. These events are designed to bring members together in person to share what they've learned and get feedback on their challenges. Although organizing these events can be a lot of work, the results are always worth it. We've seen a noticeable increase in engagement and participation after each event.
Recently, I've brought on a new team member, Ida Radovanovic, who has been a great help in organizing and running these events. Her expertise and passion for the community have allowed me to reduce my workload and create even better events for our members.
2) Streak Bot
Another way we've increased engagement within the community is through our streak bot gamification. We have a Slack channel called "What I'm Doing Today" where members share their tasks for the day on a daily basis. Our bot keeps count of the number of consecutive days that each member is able to carry on. At the end of each month, we have a "Wall of Fame" where members can see the current and all-time streaks of our most dedicated members. Believe it or not, some members have kept their streaks for over 150 days so far! Recently, after the request of a couple of members, I made the bot more forgiving and now it allows members to take weekends off without losing their streaks.
3) More Bots
I've also created several other bots that help to gamify different aspects of the community.
Members can add their indie maker's information to their profile pages. There they can define information like the number of domains, MRR, and the number of products they've built.
Twice a month, the top ten in each category are sent to our "Build-in-Public" channel. This keeps people on their toes and provides a fun way to track progress and progress within the community. One metric that receives mixed feelings from members is the number of domains, as it is not always clear if having more domains is necessarily a good thing. 😛
I've also made an integration with twitter and created the "WBE Ambassador" based on the number of times the member mentions the community (@wbespace) on Twitter. Our winner in November won a one-of-a-kind WBE mug.
4) Random Coffees
In addition, we have a channel called "Random Coffee" where members are matched every week with other makers for a coffee chat. After being tagged in pairs, the members are responsible for arranging the meeting themselves. To make sure that the people in that channel are always active, I've created a bot that removes from the channel members that do not participate for more than 15 days.
Gamification has played a crucial role in increasing engagement and participation within the Wannabe Entrepreneur (WBE) community. By introducing elements of competition and track progress, we've been able to motivate our members to stay engaged and continue working on their projects.
One of the most successful examples of this is our streak bot. This seemingly small and simple addition to the community has resulted in an impressive increase in engagement, with some members maintaining streaks for over 150 days.
It goes to show that sometimes the most unpredictable things can end up being the most engaging and effective. Gamification has proven to be an essential tool in keeping our community engaged, and motivated and helping members achieve their goals.
Try out our community for free at https://wannabe-entrepreneur.com/community
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