Community Leaderboard: gamifying member experience with accountability challenges

Because collecting digital likes and badges never helped anybody. Gamification is one of those things that sounds like a great strategy when you’re doing it to people - not when it’s being done on you.

Ask yourself, have you ever been “incentivised” to post in a community with the promise of getting the next badge or reaching a new made-up level? Then why do you assume it will work on your members?

Such superficial gamification features artificially inflate engagement, create noise and don't help members achieve real goals. Plus, it alienates the introverts in your community. That's a problem, especially if people are joining your community for transformational experience.

What if we told you that there's a way to gamify member experience while helping them make real progress?

Creating accountability challenges

Everyone who joins your community, says they need “accountability” to do something they know they should be doing, right? Something they are struggling to do alone. It can be reaching out to 100 strangers in 100 days or publishing more content or following your framework to make the progress they want to make.

In fact, “accountability” is the second most common reason for anyone to join a community (first being “networking”).

So, here’s the idea - give them a challenge!

Challenge your members to do the work they already want to do.

Something like this:

How accountability challenges help you

3 ways:

• Collect powerful testimoinals as people crush their goals
• Gamify the member experience in your community
• Increase engagement authentically

Creating an accountability challenge to gamify your member’s progress turns your community into a goal-crushing machine.

If collecting digital likes is like building a facebook, creating a challenges leaderboard is like building Duolingo. 2 approaches to gamification. One creates a toxic environment for the participant while the other is uplifting.

How do you do it?

We built the Leaderboards tool to make it easy to host accountability challenges. Using it you can simply describe your challenge, set weekly goals for the participants and track their progress.

The tool does the heavy lifting for you.

1. Creates a beautiful landing page that members will want to join.

   

2. Nudges members to update their progress in a timely manner.

   Members don't need to login to our service to participate in the challenge. Everything happens over email.

   

3. Encourages virality

   It also helps you boost your word-of-mouth growth by nudging challengers to share their progress on social media at the right moments.

   

It's like CrossFit, but for your community (and less sweaty). And we believe a better implementation of "gamification".

Plus, you get the tools to put networking on autopilot

We have also created powerful tools to help you foster meaningful connections between your members. After all, it is the #1 reason why people join a community.

1-on-1 networking tool

Stop leaving member connections to chance. Create networking programs to play the matchmaker at scale using our much loved matchmaking tool.

Learn more here

Member directory tool

If your community is on Slack, Discord, Facebook or Whatsapp, you must be familiar with the “who’s who” chaos. It’s when a member isn’t able to participate in your community because they have no easy way to find the right people.

So we created the directory tool. It allows you to create a searchable, filterable member directory where members can find and be found by other members.

Learn more here

Hear it from a community creator who 5x’ed his community

Anthony Castrio, founder of Indie Worldwide, created a simple “100 users in 100 days” challenge that 5x'ed his community growth overnight. He describes this experience in this podcast snippet