How to reward community members?

Author: Katerina, Co-Lead, TogetherCrew

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There are two camps: Community members should be rewarded for their actions and being a community member is reward enough. There’s a fine balance under the hood, so let’s unpack the why, who, how, and what of rewards and incentives.

Why you should reward people

It would be great if internal motivation was enough to get people to post content, support each other, warn about scammers and so on. But in most communities, it isn’t. The trick is finding the highest leverage rewards, those that make the community sustainable, instead of turning it into a soulless bounty hunter hole.

Rewarding members, when done well, lets you strike two birds with one stone: (1) Keep active members motivated by recognizing their effort and (2) signal to everyone about what behavior you expect from members.

And yes, of course, people will try to game your system. But that’s the minority. It’s annoying, especially in crypto it seems to be omnipresent. As a community manager it means you have to keep on tweaking the system until you got the right processes and incentives in place.

Don’t worry too much about specific individuals staying active. While it’s great if Jane is an active member in your community for 5 consecutive years, this is a very unlikely scenario. Better plan to have a stable number of active people, let’s say 10% of your community.

Who should be rewarded

This is the big question, and the answer depends on what you want to achieve. And this will change over time.

For example, having many followers is (still) used as a signal that your brand is awesome, of high quality and important in your field. What a “high number” is slightly context dependent. In some cases, it is 5K, for others it is more like 10K.

One way to get many followers is to have community members write or speak about you. Hence, you could reward people writing threads about you, speaking at conference, or doing a workshop using your product. A key metrics for this is share of voice, measuring how often your name is mentioned in social media and across websites.

You could (or should if spam is getting out of hand) fine-tune for what you are giving out rewards. Is any post that mentions your community reward-worthy? Or only detailed technical documents? Or how about videos?

You can group the behavior you want to incentives into two categories: Nudge members to do more within one platform (go deep) or across platforms (go broad). Here is a list of behaviors you could incentives:

• Answering questions correctly
• Moderating a channel
• Being active
• Posting content that gets high engagement
• Speaking at an event
• Moderating a panel
• Cross-posting content to other platforms

How you should reward people

The next thing you need to decide is how are you going to reward them. This can be financially but doesn’t have to be. If your budget is small, you can still do a lot. Just thing back to why your members joined your community and tap into that desire, amplify it. Also don’t forget that some members value being early and welcome any signals they can share with the outside world about their OG-status. And then, of course, others just love to help out.

Giving points has been making the rounds in crypto, and is a long-standing feature of web2 (anyone collecting Airline miles or points at the local supermarket?). Points normally translate into some economic value.

Other non-financial ways to reward members is to give them access to specific channels, add them to an allowlist for digital artifacts, give them early access to your features or partnership products, or offer a reward.

Advanced Considerations

Ultimately, what you want to do is build a thriving community, not just grow noise. So, whenever you’re thinking about incentives, make sure they support that which is intrinsically great about the community. For example, in a community of writers, why do members join?

• if it is to get jobs ⇒ e.g. financial incentives for those who share a job opportunity in the chat
• if it is to get feedback ⇒ e.g. priority status for those who provide the most feedback so they can get a lot of feedback too

How to go about it

1. Brainstorm 1–3 things that would support your community’s objectives
2. Identify behaviors that if members took, would advance the objective(s)
3. Think (or even better, talk with members) about what their motivations are for participating in the community? You want to have clarity on what their desired goal is.
4. Select incentives that both encourage the behavior you want and check that they align with the deep motivations of community members.
5. Test, refine, iterate, and keep evolving. Over time, involve motivated members more and more in the design process too.

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