Boosting Community Engagement With Innovation in the Gamification Space

By Varun Luthra, Country Head, ANZ, Grazitti Interactive

Gamification is often used as an engagement tactic in many industry types. Why, you ask? Because it works! Especially when applied to the online community space.

Gamification is a technique that adds game-like features to the community to make it a more fun and interactive experience for customers. It is designed to take community engagement up a notch by providing members an incentive to participate.

Research suggests that gamification may increase new business users by almost 600%[i]. Another study shows that by 2024, the gamification market will touch $32 billion[ii].

But what’s next when it comes to the application of gamification in online communities? Let’s find out!

The Role of Gamification in an Online Community

Gamification ignites members’ interest and encourages them to contribute to the community on a regular basis. A successful online community will embed gamification as it is a proven method of generating engagement.

Communities utilize gamification by rewarding and recognizing members with:

• Badges

• Ranks and levels

• Points

• Custom avatars

• Leaderboards

Another advantage of applying gamification in online communities is that it promotes transparency among users. Users can see what their peers are doing in the community and what they are doing to win the rewards.

Game-Changing Innovations in the Gamification Space to Make Your Community Dynamic

Game-like features in an online community have a way of keeping community participation ongoing. It not only starts with members becoming competitive to achieve rewards and recognition from their peers, but can also spark genuine conversations.

Here are some recent innovations in the gamification space that you can apply to your community and make it more cutting-edge.

Integrating Your Community With Third-Party APIs: An Application Programming Interface (API) allows two systems to talk to one another. This allows for seamless integration and more accessibility between two systems. You need an API with which you can fully integrate gamification technology within your community. This enables you to manage which community actions or activities are more or less relevant and how each of them is to be rewarded through gamification.

1) Integrating Your Community With Third- Party APIs:

An Application Programming Interface (API) allows two systems to talk to one another. This allows for seamless integration and more accessibility between two systems. You need an API with which you can fully integrate gamification technology within your community. This enables you to manage which community actions or activities are more or less relevant and how each of them is to be rewarded through gamification.

2) Decentralizing Your Community With Blockchain:

If you have multiple independent communities, you can use a decentralized gamification system to transfer data between them. The data can include member points, rewards, ranks, etc. This helps link multiple communities together, which lets your customers view their progress on the community of their choice.

3) Analyzing Gamification Metrics for Better Community Engagement:

Leveraging gamification can boost engagement by using incentives but that’s not all you need to focus on. It is just as important to know how your members are responding to your gamification efforts. Analyze your members’ behaviors and identify why certain activities or incentives are more effective than others. When you have answers to these questions, you can use this knowledge to grow your community. Dig into metrics, tools, and dashboards to decode member behavior within a gamification system. This in-depth knowledge will help you to know why your incentives are working and how to optimize your engagement strategy.

People are creatures of habit. Once your members start engaging with each other in the community, they will continue to collaborate and make the community thrive.

Gamification creates an opportunity for brands to highlight, acknowledge, incentivize, and reward members for making their communities more robust.

Team Grazitti has extensive experience in building robust, multidimensional online communities that empower you to take your business to the next level. To know more about ScoreNotch, our gamification solution for Salesforce Lightning communities, drop us a line at info@grazitti.com and we’ll take it from there.