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Exploring Advocacy Programs Beyond Influitive

Has anyone moved off of Influitive (yes, we are still on it) and kept an advocacy program without using another advocacy-specific platform? Like maybe you used a Slack community but still provided incentives for acts of advocacy? Or you used your existing community forum? Not looking for demos or anything at this time of advocacy platform… just thinking/planning. 🙂

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Hey, Maura. I run an advocacy community at Grammarly. We run regular acts of advocacy challenges with incentives. We track a bit manually and with Common Room. Happy to chat further.

I’m a member of the advocacy community leads at Grammarly — top notch and highly engaged group of users :1000000:

Would love to chat! Let me know if you prefer a Slack DM here, a call, or an email 🙂

Is your advocacy program tied to your tech stack? Ie. Community, LMS, events...other?

It is! We are integrated with our LMS, community, etc. We host events on Zoom (roundtables, etc) but the only “tie” is that they get points in Influitive if they attend

If you moved your gamification to Slack, then you could use either or a combo of Common Room (a current client of mine) + Tightknit for the program, 😊

Hope it’s helpful to you!

please let me know if you get any unwanted outreach. Vendors shouldn't be emailing, DMing, etc without your permission.

I'll send you a DM, Maura!

I'd love to hear what you do at Grammarly, too. 😄

For what it's worth, we're still on Influitive -- one year now. We signed on about 2 weeks before the acquisition announcement. Anyway, our customers haven't really been digging the whole gamification thing. They join and do a few things, but then they disappear. Hardly any pickup from our weekly Digest of new challenges. We have only the Advocate Hub, not discussion forums. I probably wouldn't look for another gamification platform.

Emma is going to share her community/advocacy program with us at the end of January in a Friday meetup. 😄

I could’ve written the above! Gamification just doesn’t cut it. I find our customers are much more interested in things like talking to our Product team and having their voice heard/products improved than anything else.

or learning from each other. We don't have a community for them to do this (yet).

Yes, we have found success with customer roundtables and the like.

I often hear people say that gamification "doesn't work". That's a common sentiment when using points, badges, and leaderboards (PBL). Those are first-generation strategies and can work in some use cases. Here's what I've found:

  • The "engagement" effect with PBL drops since most people suffer from reward fatigue and indifference.
  • Earning endless points is meaningless
  • Hardly anyone cares about leaderboards
  • Badges are digital stickers. Hardly shared, and no one cares.

There are much better ways to add gamification to drive behavior change. If you're looking for an incentive framework, I highly recommend the SAPS model, by Gabe Zichermann.

Status, Access, Power, and Stuff. Once you understand your end users' personas, you can start figuring out what kinds of incentives they'll find appealing.

But is sounds like Access would be an important one for your end-users...and lots of cool ways to add/offer value to them to keep them engaged.

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