Foster's Tutorial: Quality Content
Are you looking for a way to reward quality postings in your community?
Are you looking to recognize superusers who make an outsized contribution to your community?
Are you looking to build a knowledge hub with reputable information?
Trying to sift through the morass of community posts can be a difficult feat for most community managers, as many communities are filled with low quality posts on general discussion topics, off topic jokes, or social chit chat. If you're an admin who wants to cut through the chit chat and grow your reputation for high quality information, then you need a way to both recognize and reward reputable users.
Trophies & Medals by @Fosters is a full-featured awards system that will enable you to recognize the contributions of your users. In this tutorial, I'm going to show you how to create a simple but effective automated system that rewards trophies based upon user reputation. Using the native IPS functionality of reputation that gives users +1 / -1, you can build your own trophy system in minutes.
1. First, navigate to the ACP > Trophies and Medals app, which will show you all of the options for the application.
2. Click on Trophies > + Create New button. You will create a trophy category with a Name and Description. For example: "Trophies for Reputation." Click Save.
Enter in the Name and Description to create a Project category.
3. Once you've created a category, click on + to "Add Trophy." Create your first trophy with the Name, Description, and Icon. For example: "Awesome Rep +1".
Enter in the Name, Description, and Icon to create a new Trophy.
4. Click on the tab "Award this trophy if..." and select User received at least X reputation = 1. This will award the trophy when the user has received his first reputation. You can browse and select other criteria as needed. Click Save.
User received at least X reputation should be 1.
Congratulations, you did it! You created your first trophy that auto-awards any member with at least 1 reputation. If you want, you can go back and start creating more trophies for different levels of reputation. This is what it can look like once you add more trophies:
By creating a series of trophies that automatically award members for superior reputation, you're recognizing the positive contributions of your membership and motivating them to continue posting quality content! This will result in more meaningful posts in your community, motivating users to offer insightful and useful commentary to other members, and deepen the quality of conversation. Best of all, it gives you an automated award system that constantly runs in the background without any further work on your part. You target positive behavior in your community and encourage users to build up the collective body of knowledge over time.
Advanced Tips
Here are a couple of our favorite tips on making the most of the trophy system for quality content:
Inform your users about the new trophy badges that they can earn! Write 2 - 3 short topics on how they earn the trophy badges, what the different badges signity, and to seek input and involvement on creative brainstorming for the badges. It's a great way to roll it out in advance and get your community excited about this new way to reward quality posts!
Give a unique compliment such as "Awesome job!" or "People think you're amazing!" in the description of each trophy. This engenders a positive feedback loop to encourage more positive behavior.
Make your levels progressively harder. Instead of every 5 reputation levels (eg. 1, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25), try to make it harder over time so users need to work more to obtain the next trophy (eg. 1, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100). This ensures that trophies aren't too easy to attain in a routine fashion.
Let users know when their next trophy is awarded in the description. This gives them a goal to work towards and a reason to login to your community. For example, if they're at a trophy for reputation 20, let the user know to keep up the good work and receive their next trophy at reputation 50. This offers a goal completion to motivate users.
If you run a Q&A forum, you can target 'best answers' using specialized trophy criteria and let your community compete for the most best answers.
Recognize them in person! While the best part about the Trophies & Medals system is the level of automation that you can define in advance, you should take the time to recognize and cheer on members when they hit certain levels. It doesn't have to be every time nor for every user, but when you notice a great post or a lot of reputation, let them know they're on their way to earning their next trophy for reputation!
I hope you enjoyed this Foster's Tutorial and learned some new things. We're always open for questions or issues, and be sure to "like" this topic so we can start earning our reputation badges too .
Fosters