How can you balance fun and learning in gamification and incentives for community outreach?

One example of a low fidelity gamification mechanism is when an organization awards “Badges” or a virtual token for participating in an event, training, charity fundraiser, or for simply joining a community engagement group’s mailing list. Badges were used as a community building tool launching and growing the Amazon Bicycle Coalition (ABC) which connected Amazon employees around the globe to opportunities to get involved with bike related charity and service opportunities. Subscribers to ABC’s email list received a community badge ikon which displays on the employee internal directory webpage. The employee directory provides an all in one landing page for a short bio, community badge ikon section, and an awards/acknowledgments section.

There’s a big distinction between extrinsic motivation and instrinsic motivation. Extrinsic rewards is a level 5 engagement behavior, defined as self regulated interest. This is when you are piquing someone’s interest and getting them excited with a carrot on a stick but this will not elicit behaviors like innovation and creativity. Level 6 of the 7 levels of engagement is defined as critical engagement when you’re inspiring someone to set goals to make a difference. What’s interesting is if someone is at this level and you try to incentivize them with a carrot on a stick you may actually lower their level of engagement as they are not participating for the external reward but the internal incentive.

In my experience running large scale engagement initiatives I typically found the most effective utilization of incentives/gamification is when the outreach messaging is simple, consistent in style, and provides adequate details to establish and build trust within a developing community space. One discovery after years testing various types of messaging with Amazon Bike Coalition outreach was that concise, attractively designed marketing materials that clearly present a simple/efficient “how to/call to action”, consumable within 10 seconds on a short elevator ride or pass by a bulletin board were by far the most effective methods.