Over the past few weeks, we have been diving into the different ways online communities enhance member experience and drive engagement. This week, we are going to discuss how gamification within your community can improve user engagement and encourage collaboration. Click here to view last week’s topic to help boost your member experience even further!
What is Gamification?
Gamification is adding elements like badges and game mechanics into an online community or learning platform. These elements are meant to inspire motivation and encourage members to interact with the community.
How does gamification enhance member experience?
A great way to use gamification in your online community is through training exercises and learning systems. Breezio clients use the “collections” feature as a light learning system; and this process could easily be taken to the next level with added gamification features. For example, members could be awarded badges, certificates, or other forms of recognition when completing the learning task. Using gamification in this situation motivates the user to engage with the content and earn more and more badges.
Gamification adds a sense of competition and autonomy to your members; they are able to interact with your platform and feel motivated to complete a task. Earning badges can also improve your “rank” in the system to show your status in relation to others in the community playing games.
One of the main issues we see from clients is lack of engagement from members. Sure, there are plenty of posts and content for members to see, but leaders are not seeing the engagement results they want. This can be attributed to many factors, but oftentimes it's simple. People can be “lurkers” in the community; meaning they see the content being posted but never post their own or react to posts. Gamification provides a different way to interact. It gives others the opportunity to participate in the community without feeling like they are sacrificing privacy. As more people earn badges, others in the community will feel more encouraged to interact.