Launching gamification in established support community

​@jwren - It’s awesome that you’re launching gamification in your community! As you likely know, there are a variety of different thoughts people have on when/how to do this. Here are my two cents. Take what you want, leave the rest. 😀

• It’s a good thing, if it’s VERY thoughtful. It’s easy to throw together a gamification plan, but if you haven’t put a lot of thought into how it will play out over the long run, you could be setting yourself up for failure (and community members for disappointment).
• If you didn’t already, take a few of your most engaged members. Go through the motion of determining how they’d perform with your program (ranks, points) over the course of a year. Do the same for a mildly engaged member. Then do it for someone who barely ever engages. See how long it would take them to rank up. This will help you determine if your plan will encourage/discourage different parts of your community population. 
• Don’t tell the all the details! This is again where you need to be thoughtful. You want to encourage them to participate, but you don’t want them to gamify the program (which they will). So, for instance, you may want to share that they get points for posting a question. But don’t tell them they get it for liking a post (because they’ll like every post across the site, whether they like them or not). Give them just enough to want them to engage. 
• Reevaluate your program after three, six, nine months. As much as we try, we can’t predict human behavior. Gamification isn’t something you can set and forget. You have to monitor how it’s working and make adjustments early and often to make sure it’s getting the actions you want (another reason not to tell members your entire recipe). 

Those are just a few thoughts, so I hope they help! 

Hi ​@JeniA 👋 

Thanks for the really thoughtful response...I work with Joel and have a follow up question and wondered if you had any thoughts. 

One of the reasons we’ve held back on releasing the leaderboard is that we just transitioned to a community first support approach and currently have our care team monitoring incoming questions and offering answers really quickly so that we can turn on that switch in our users heads that they can come to our community and get the quick support that they’re used to with our amazing care team. 

What’s the problem you ask? Well our care team dominate the leaderboards and leave very little space for our users to help each other and earn points. Long term, we of course plan to slow down the response times of our support team to allow other community users to engage in answers more, but right now our leaderboard does look quite sad when we exclude the support team. 

Do you think it would be best to hide the leaderboards for now or would you publish them anyway, even if the scores look quite low? 

That’s a solid question, ​@jpaul. I guess my first question would be around why you want such heavy involvement from your care team. (This is me knowing nothing about your business or strategy. 😀) What you want to always consider in the early stage of any change is how you’re training behavior. If your care team is always there, there’s a chance the community will learn that behavior and accept that that’s how the community is designed. So I wonder….do you not trust that the community is willing, or can, support each other by answering questions? I realize that’s something beyond your ask, but that’s where I’d start. 

When it comes to what you actually asked, if you’re continuing to have your care team involved at a level where they’re essentially outshining the members themselves, you don’t want to show that on a leaderboard. If you were the member seeing employee (not community member names) on the leaderboard, you’d likely be discouraged. So your intuition was correct, in my opinion. I would either:

• Not show the leaderboard
• Show the leaderboard, but find a way not to have any employees added (not sure if this is possible with Gainsight’s functionality, but this would be my preference)

One of the magical aspects of community is that members have the opportunity to help each other, with little involvement from the organization. You want to get to that stage quickly so you’re your training the behavior that they can (and should) help each other. This also helps elevate their individual voices and gives them a place to shine on their own. Again...just my thoughts. I hope some of it helps! 

The Gainsight community does allow excluding certain roles from the leaderboard, as explained here:

We recently excluded our employees from the leaderboard. It did trigger questions from community members on what they could do to move up the board, so I’d indeed suggest to exclude employees once your community is active enough (which seems to be the case with 60k members).