Is our rank structure too "hard"? Looking for feedback!

I found this course from The Community Strategy to have some really great content on ranks and how to effectively build them, along with some examples. (Full disclosure: there’s a fee for the course. Here’s a referral code for 10% off. This is not my business; I’m just a customer who has taken the course and recommend it.)

In general, my recommendation on ranks and badges is that the “sweet spot” is a combination of:

1. Context for other users (how knowledgable is this user that replied to my post / created this post?)
2. Recognition valuable to the primary user (does contributing to the community help me in my career?)

I talked about those things two years ago at Pulse. Presentation here. 

Just a quick overview of your gamification structure: Answers/solutions will be the hardest to obtain in your setup. It requires a moderator or person asking the question to mark it something as the true solution. These are always hard to get but most valuable for your community. I recommend the solutions reminder feature in admin to try and boost this.

Being honest here with my community, 332 users out of ~180k are in the more advanced stages of our gamification structure. Most users, in my 11 year experience in communities, lurk and use community as a source of information.

Tips to help this grow: I would recommend creating a super user program. Meeting with those top users is key as they are the source of your replies, answers and knowledge for the community.

Keep track of newer users and how they contribute. If you have a newer person contributing be sure to reachout and send a genuine thank you. That really helps people feel seen and want to contribute more.

I like this structure! I think with this, you evaded the biggest mistake in our first take on one, which was fewer tiers that were a lot of work to achieve. Our rationale had been to plan for longevity in the program and longer-term motivation with more to do, but then we ran into exactly what ​@mitchell.gordon described - the number of people who actually participate in a community in that sort of way is inevitably just going to be smaller, and the time/effort it took to achieve those higher levels ended up being demotivating. 

When we reworked ours, we made sure to have quicker, lower effort wins like you do with “active,” “seasoned,” and “committed” to build some early momentum and get people plugged into the ecosystem before ramping up. 

Thank you ​@DannyPancratz ​@mitchell.gordon ​@mbuuck1 for your feedback. I got some ideas from your replies to improve the current ranking structure. I’ll get back with an update on how we are going to change our ranks.

FYI ​@Anitahg 

If you’d like to discuss further, please let me know. Happy to discuss on a call!

Have a great Friday all!

​@Mithila Jayalath We just launched our Community at the end of January and we have a slightly different set up, which we collaborated on with our Gainsight on boarding manager and I also looked at different articles for best practices on ranks. 

 

We kept the first few ranks really easy to accomplish, but the higher the rank the more we also ask and not only in replies or topics but also in answers or how long you have been a members. Otherwise I would have a few customers that would already run through the ranks in little time.