How to Incentivize Moderators in 2020| Experts’ Roundup
As community forums become essential tools for scaling support, it’s getting natural for brands to need some helping hands for keeping their things organized and ensuring the conversation runs smoothly and everyone can tap into the real-time discussions.
That’s where moderators come in: to help your community grow and stay full of beans to make sure everyone is doing good.
According to research from the University of Michigan, customers who engage in a brand’s community spend 19% more than those that do not.
If engagement is key to success then moderators are essential in driving it within your community and thereby unlocking its true power I think.
Just think of pedaling a bicycle — you need to pedal a little harder at the outset to drive momentum. But once the bicycle is going, it moves more effortlessly. Agree!
In the same way, moderators are necessary to pedal your bicycle i.e your community and then help you to maintain that forward momentum.
What are Moderators?
Moderators are internal employees or can be external power users who are contributing answers, moderating questions and responses within a community.
They are out there, waiting to share insights and experiences — but they are currently an untapped resource when it comes to supporting. They may be employees looking to stretch themselves in a new capacity, everyday users looking to do more to advance their careers or people fueled by a passion for helping others.
We can all think of that friend who quickly jumps in with well-researched advice on a new phone, camera, or TV. Maybe you or someone you know is a passionate member of the local running forums or parent groups, eager to advise and share his/her knowledge.
In this blog post, I’ll show you how to incentivize moderators that will help you to keep them motivated, can increase their contribution, and gives active engagement, all at the same time.
How to incentivize moderators
Recently, one of our newly joined member Malavikka Sridharan Sundar, Founder at Married Superwomen Repertoire came up with this question as ‘How do you incentivize your moderators’.
After she posted, many folks of our community have given answers from their experiences and the different ways that they used to incentivize their moderators in the communities they are running or were a part of, as a Community Manager.
The following are the ways upon incentivizing moderators in a community I hope will help you, given by our community experts.
GIVE THEM USEFUL GIFTS:
This can be the best way to incentivize your moderators, as you only have to think of something useful that can help them with their personal as well as professional growth.
Our fellow Community Folk Biswajeeta Rath, Senior Community Manager at Sprinklr says she used to gift books to moderators in a community of digital marketers called ‘Learn Digital Marketing’.
ACCESS TO COMMUNITY EVENTS:
When it comes to community events such as meetups, catchups & dinners, every single member wants to join & meet other members from the community to know them in-person.
And missing such events can increase your chances of losing out your members. So giving your moderators free access to these events can give them a good number of offline interactions and pump up their excitement for a longer-term.
Sonia Agarwal Konjeti who is running a community of Pune ladies named PULA Pune Ladies and a part of our community says: Perks, Presence and free entry to all meetups are few things through which she incentivizes moderators in her community.
APPRECIATE THEIR EFFORTS:
Many members do efforts to make our community a better place, but sometimes we as community admins miss out to appreciate those who are always making an extra effort to keep our communities alive & active.
So appreciating efforts made by moderators is another way to keep their momentum up for a community.
Adam Turnbull, Co-Founder at UnicornFuel.io and Community Admin at TechLondon.io Slack Community, says we appreciate their efforts with things like a tray of doughnuts, or even just a mention in a monthly newsletter.
TAKE HELP FROM INTERNAL MEMBERS
Varu Dwarak who is currently working as Online Community Manager at Meesho mentioned that she used to find members who is already doing business in her community. By purchasing their products and distributing them to the community moderators is one of the great ways to incentivize your moderators.
KEEP THEM MOTIVATED:
Albert Arul Prakash Rajendran who had been associated with various communities said:
Being an admin, you’ll definitely come across a number of people from your community who are extremely excited, want to join as a moderator and help you with group moderation.
Your responsibility is to keep their self-motivation high and let them moderated the group under defined guidelines. In this discussion, Albert who recently joined us as a new member says he has self-motivated moderators to help him with moderating the FB group. Also, he reaches out to active members, engage with them and try to bring them as moderators in the group. That’s a good approach we all can follow.
So by empowering your moderators, establishing processes around community moderation and escalation and thinking creatively about how to tap into your community can make it a true destination for your members.
Above mentioned is the discussion that took place in our Community Folks group and I hope these points will help you in incentivizing your moderators.
We would like to thank all of them for sharing these valuable learnings with us.
Are we missing any important point here? It’s a community-driven blog, if you have anything similar from your community-building experience, do add your thoughts in the comment section and it will be updated here.
