Let's Talk about Gamification & Rewards

Recognizing your employees' efforts 

Let’s start with the basic principle. We often say that rewards and gamification shouldn’t be the driving force behind your advocacy efforts but can contribute to achieving your goals.

What’s more important is motivating your employees intrinsically, and you can do this by recognizing their efforts. 

Recognition is a basic human need; by recognizing your employees for the effort they put in to be your ambassador, they will be much more likely and encouraged to go the extra mile for you.

How can you do this? 

• Share results with your ambassadors via community campaigns
  

  Example from our customer Helan

• Nominate an "Ambassador of the month"
  
  Example from our customer Nipro
• Provide LinkedIn recommendations for your ambassadors
• Feature your ambassadors in a social media post
  Example from our Ambassify Instagram profile

Keeping your advocates motivated

To incentivize advocates even more, you can add a gamification layer with points, rewards, and goals.

By introducing a leaderboard, you can make interactions more fun and competitive. The more points you earn, the higher you’ll be in the ranking. 

Custom leaderboards allow you to rank specific groups of advocates – for example, only people from the Marketing team. This could be especially useful if you’re rolling out an advocacy program within an enterprise company; this way, you can avoid having your employees end up on a leaderboard with people they don’t know. It’s an easy and fun way to spark friendly and healthy competition among your peers. 

Instead of individual rewards, our goals feature allows you to create competition on a collective basis. This way, you can stimulate social involvement and engagement in your member base. 

The way it works is pretty straightforward and intuitive:

• You can set up a time frame, a number of points to attain, a description, etc. But you can add one or multiple objectives to each goal, so you can also set up specific team goals within the community.

“Adding a gamification layer to your advocacy program can almost double the monthly activation of your community.”

Based on our research on customers

Adding rewards to your community

Adding rewards means taking your gamification system one step forward. Rewards are not meant to be the main drivers in the community — same as the general point rewarding system — but they are a cool incentive for your ambassadors and a nice way for you to spread branded merch, for example, or give your employees a few extras they’ll appreciate.

Here are some ideas for your reward section:

• Monetary rewards. They are often seen as weaker motivators. Our preference goes for the option to sponsor a charity of choice.  Similar, yet more personalized, incentives are vouchers, discounts, gift cards, etc.
  
  
• Giving access. Open all doors for your ambassadors and give them access to exclusive activities or content — dinner with the CEO, access to a VIP event, early bird access to a conference, etc.
  
  
• Be original and personal. This is the number one rule to apply to everything about your community.
  
  
• Stay close to your company culture. Rewards and gamification are also a way to do that, so take advantage of the possibilities at hand: Make sure your employees understand how they can earn the rewards.
  
  
• Mix monetary and non-monetary rewards. This way you'll find out which rewards work best for your audience

• Pro tip! You can launch an ideation campaign in your community to gather reward ideas!

Example from our Ambassify community