Hump Day: how do you incentivize your community to engage?

[Jordan Miller]

Happy Hump Day, team. 

Offering opportunities for engagement is one of the cornerstones of the Invision Community platform. I'm curious to know how you incentivize your members to engage?

Ways to create engagement:

Engagement happens when you can successfully inspire emotion in others. Creating content that invokes a reaction / action (hopefully positive) is one major way to contribute towards engagement. 

Some communities' purpose is to offer information, educate and sell, but if they can also incorporate avenues for their audience to engage it will help strengthen the brand's presence and foster trust. 
 

Invision Community tactics to create engagement:

• Start a new topic
• Leave a reply in a content item (like a topic, blog post, news article and calendar event)
• React to members' content ("like," "love" etc)
• Create and respond to private messages
• Reading content items (silent engagement)
   

Reports:

It's worth mentioning our platform has a ton of outstanding reporting metrics baked into the ACP to measure engagement. Some of my personal faves include member activity, member visits and posts. This is important to note because you'll see what engagement methods are working, and what areas need improvement. 
 

How do you actually go about incentivizing members to create great, engaging content in the first place? 

Tools to incentivize

In my opinion, one of the most powerful ways is to promote members' content across the community so that it's very visible to others. From my experience, this encourages that promoted member to create more similar content and fires up others to follow suit.

We have some pretty awesome tools to help you:

• Announcements
  Create a finite Announcement from the Moderator Control Panel and link to a member's content item. You can give the community the option to X out of the announcement should they A) not want to proceed or B) they've engaged with the content and no longer need a reminder. An announcement is a pretty overt style of promotion, but it's great way to shine a light on your members' events, a product, a download, club creation and/or topic.
   
• Featured list
  Create a block that showcases your members' Featured content. This style of content curation ensures the community is viewing and engaging with content items (like topics) that you and your moderators feel is particularly noteworthy.  
   
• Our Picks
  This is a more visually rich style of curating content than the Featured list of topics mentioned above. Add a beautiful thumbnail & eye-catching caption then promote directly to Twitter. Be sure to enable Our Picks in the ACP, then add it as a block on a prominent page within your community. 
   
• Achievements
  Our native gamification system, Achievements, automatically rewards members with points, badges and ranks for their participation. Better yet, you and your team can manually reward members for positively contributing to the community. Write the member a message that others can see and give them props for them for being awesome and creating engaging content. 
   
• Alerts System
  Use this sparingly, but if you or a member creates something worth your community's undivided attention, use the Alerts System feature to guide them to that piece of content. Be sure to set an expiration date so that content isn't promoted in perpetuity. 
   

Opportunties to incentivize

• Offer exclusive perks
  Set up a Group with additional access (that you create) and reward members who positively contribute by upgrading their account. This will encourage others to create and engage in an effort to join an elite, exclusive group.
   
• Create community ambassadors 
  Reward your superfans! Similarly to the aforementioned, create an ambassador program for your most-engaged members and publicly recognize them as community VIPs. Grant them special privileges in the hopes they continue to create and promote your community. 
   
• Send a special newsletter 
  Using the bulk mail took in the ACP, send your ambassadors a content rich email that offers value (like what's in the pipeline, a chance to review a product, roadmap or idea before anyone else). The
   

Whew! If you made it to the end of this information-rich post, congrats to you. 🍪 So, how do you personally go about incentivizing your members to engage? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

As always, here's a list of updates and fixes made to the platform in the last seven days:

Quote

- Fixed an issue where guest referrals may not be correctly applied.
- Fixed an issue where duplicate Who's Viewing boxes are displayed.
- Fixed an issue where carousel image blocks may break the layout.
- Fixed an issue where the related content sidebar block may not correctly account for permissions.
- Fixed an issue where future posts may appear in post feed blocks.
- Fixed search REST API failing.
- Running any action on the ACP transactions table will redirect now to the same page where the action was called(WIP-PLS improve the change log message)
- Fixed an issue where quote attributes could trigger the profanity filters.
- Fixed an issue where the create/edit record form would break.
- Fixed a a template error that can show during Multi-Factor Validation when viewing account credits in Commerce.
- Fixed an issue where rebuilding record topics would fail.
- Fixed an issue in Downloads where images in descriptions would show ahead of screenshots in RSS exports.
- Improved the license check to bypass the member's timezone setting.
- Fixed an issue where rebuilding record topics would fail.
- Fixed an issue where clubs would show both items and comments in recent activity. 

Looking forward to engaging with you in the comments.