My best advice is to find ways to bring the community into the employees’ main workspace. 

For us, that’s Slack. I have many zapier automations that bring alerts of new posts into specific feeds. 

You could do the same the with Teams or even try a campaign to get them to subscribe to specific category forums for email alerts. 

Why this works:

• It makes it “easy” for them to see what’s going on in the community. If they see the questions/posts with titles and tags, it’s easy to click a link to reply or view, etc. 
• It’s a much harder adoption/engagement lift to change their behavior to visit the community on their own. As an employee, they might not have as much of a value prop to visit and see what’s going on. So the the solution is to bring the community activity to them. 

You can even tailor this based on specific categories or tags or keywords in the post. What is that person/team interested in or what areas do they own? Then consider bringing a filtered view of posts on those topics into their team slack/teams channel. 

Another suggestion is an employee super user or contributor program where the reward is a quarterly report to their manager about their engagement/impact with the community. 

This works for those looking for a return on their investment in the community. If they are interested in cross-functional feedback or a report about how they’re helping, you then tap into their own motivations to be high performing or achieve advancement. This incentives them to contribute more so that your report to their manager is “semployee] is having an impact on our community! They’ve answered X questions and in contributed to X posts over the past quarter, receiving X likes or earning X points.”

Thanks @DannyPancratz … the Zapier/Slack integration is definitely on my list to enable and maximize for the short term, as you say “bring the community into the employees’ main workspace.”, but mid term I am working to “make the Community one of employees main workspace” (atleast for the relevant teams), which I think, is a world we all are fighting for :) 

In that world Slack and emails co-exist as they do, but an increasingly less prosthetic to depend on, as the platform becomes more versatile (all the Ideas we share here).

This incentives them to contribute more so that your report to their manager is “eemployee] is having an impact on our community! They’ve answered X questions and in contributed to X posts over the past quarter, receiving X likes or earning X points.”

How have you managed to stay on top of this data from inSided console? What you looking at for this team-view, what reports are you pulling?

to your question about the data, the user analytics dashboard is pretty helpful for that. You can pick a time frame and get the total number of posts, replies, likes given/received/ answers, points, etc. 

Additionally, I’m a big proponent of the Salesforce integration if you use that as your CRM. It’s good for creating dashboards that you can filter by other account attributes like your internal employees. 

The Analytics module is definitely my kitchen counter and our Community Activity from Gainsight reports via the SF connector have long been our grocery :)

Employees are flagged as a common pool in the data and we also showcase them on the homepage, but other than that unable to identify employees per team.

@DannyPancratz, I’d imagine it’s upto manual lookups from this point... but, taking a step back to the purpose of the intra and inter-team Champion user program, have you tried some internal extrinsic RnR programs?

At a level higher than the data, I’m looking for cool internal RnR ideas folks have tried at their orgs?

We previously had a cash bonus for the top 5 points givers over a few 6-month periods. It was effective for building up a knowledge base of answered questions and engaging a small number of staff. 

However, when I went to justify the extension, my research showed that it was a motivator for the 5-8 people in contention for the cash bonus, but de-motivated those who weren’t anywhere close to contention. Once they fell behind the top people, they didn’t believe they had much of a chance to catch up (and thus didn’t engage as much). 

If you’re going to do something like that, my experience suggests shorter, more frequent time periods would be better. 

Wow… that’s some awesome real world feedback. Thank you @DannyPancratz 

I think short term, and initiative/project focused might also make sense… For the All timer ones… maybe a Community branded Hoodie for the Champs as a 1 time, or even Community branded baseball caps - that’s @Remco2’s idea :)  

Caps are always a good idea, in any situation.

Regarding the OT. I think internal engagement falls or stands with importance and visibility of a Community Program. If you e.g. report Community feedback, customer feedback on the community, new ideas and others on a Monthly basis in the all-hands, people WILL be more inclined to participate. As you’re showing them this is something that is important to the company. Another important benefit is that you’re also showing employees that some of their colleagues, friends actually are participating. And we all know about peer influences.

The Slack idea above is a good one too. I’d add to that by saying that not only it should be part of their daily workspace, it should also be a part of their job. E.g. for a PM it should be logical to ask for feedback on new feature ideas on the community. For CS, it should be normal to use Community as your partner in Q&A and e.g. increasing adoption. For Marketing, it should be logical there’s a pool of advocates on the Community that can be leveraged.

This requires, and I hate to say it (trust me): management & process. 

Totally: The self-realized ‘mission Community’ is the highest form of sustainable calling out there, however I’m hearing from real life cross-org convos, ‘extrinsic’ motivation could be a much needed supplement (for specific phases)