Rewarding Community Contributions
Rewarding Participation: How to Motivate and Recognize Community Contributions
Recognizing and rewarding community contributions is key to maintaining high levels of engagement and motivation. Here are some unique ways to effectively reward participation in your community.
Speaker Invitations and Features
Invite active members to speak at events (even your conference booths)!
Ask them to to showcase something they’ve worked on during a live Discord community discussions.
Integrate them into an internal team all-hands meeting.
Featuring community integrations on your engineering blog.
Guest blog writer opportunities.
Feature new members (with permission) and maybe something unique about them (unrelated to your product) in your weekly or monthly newsletters.
All of these ideas not only acknowledges their contributions but also gives them a platform to share their insights and experiences for the team to learn from. Seeing these examples encourages other members to contribute and be more involved.
Exclusive Access
Provide your most active members with exclusive access to your future roadmap and new features under NDA. Offer them opportunities to participate in Beta programs or monthly focus groups.
Leaderboards and Recognition
Consider setting up an advisory board.
Mentorship opportunities to those who consistently contribute to the community. These mentors can be other community members or depending on level of value possibly an internal engineer or developer advocate.
Maintain a leaderboard on platforms like Discord to track and recognize active members.
Highlight a "Community Member of the Month" to celebrate their contributions and encourage others to participate more actively.
loyalty and retention: “What should we build next?”
Use tools like UserVoice to allow members to vote on features to build or fix. Here’s an example of Firebases’ UserVoice integration. Integrating members in areas where they can actually make an impact in what is being built and prioritized. A place where they can truly have their ideas heard provides a huge sense of ownership and brand loyalty. This will also go a long way for community retention and engagement.
Conclusion
By inviting members to speak, offering exclusive access, maintaining leaderboards and asking for feedback with tools like UserVoice, you can effectively recognize and reward community contributions. Implement these strategies to boost retention, engagement, and create a thriving community!