Community

Goal: Increase participation, retention and content creation.

uBoost Solution: Grow your community by offering uBoost’s motivation tools to increase participation. uBoost helps reinforce key behaviors that can lead to a vibrant community, such as discussion board and blog participation, submitting content, reviewing products, and making referrals to other members. Contest entries and prize contests encourage activities such as attendance and logins. Leaderboard rankings and automated donations to favorite charitable organizations motivate members to learn, repeat and accelerate behaviors. Driving members to become more involved with actions like creating content, referring friends, or submitting product reviews are encouraged by offering collectable badges, avatar upgrades and exclusive premium rewards.

Communities

Gartner identified four principal means of driving engagement using gamification:

The goals of gamification are to achieve higher levels of engagement, change behaviors and stimulate innovation. The opportunities for businesses are great – from having more engaged customers, to crowdsourcing innovation or improving employee performance.

1. Accelerated feedback cycles. In the real world, feedback loops are slow (e.g., annual performance appraisals) with long periods between milestones. Gamification increases the velocity of feedback loops to maintain engagement.
2. Clear goals and rules of play. In the real world, where goals are fuzzy and rules selectively applied, gamification provides clear goals and well-defined rules of play to ensure players feel empowered to achieve goals.
3. A compelling narrative. While real-world activities are rarely compelling, gamification builds a narrative that engages players to participate and achieve the goals of the activity.
4. Tasks that are challenging but achievable. While there is no shortage of challenges in the real world, they tend to be large and long-term. Gamification provides many short-term, achievable goals to maintain engagement.
5. "Where games traditionally model the real world, organizations must now take the opportunity for their real world to emulate games," said Mr. Burke. "Enterprise architects must be ready to contribute to gamification strategy formulation and should try at least one gaming exercise as part of their enterprise context planning efforts this year."