A fun contest idea to drive engagement - over 50 new members / intros in a week :)

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Hey everyone,

Recently we upgraded our forums to the new version of Discourse and we’ve been thinking of ways to drive engagement (actually getting folks to USE the forums, not just register).

We came up with the idea for a contest - and I wanted to share it with you to see if you want to steal the idea, riff on it, or perhaps offer some advice on how we can make it even better next time.

Context - we’re a marketing agency, so we have resources available like design, programming, SEO etc to throw into a prize pool (things hopefully our community wants and needs).

What we did was this:

We took a tiered approach

No matter what, we offered $500 as a prize for anyone who introduced themselves.
But if we got over 50 intro’s we bumped the prize to $1,000 of agency work
100 was $2,500 and over 100 was $5,000

It was the first time we did it (and ran it for a week) and we got over 50 engaged users!

Here is the thread: Introduce yourself 2023 - get to know the REW Community members! - REW Chat - Real Estate Webmasters Forum / REW Community

Anyways, I thought I’d share to see if anyone could use this idea to build their community, and would welcome feedback on how we could do it better next time.

check out the fun prize draw video at the end of the thread as well :slight_smile:

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Hello Morgan,

This is great! :slightly_smiling_face:

We are using the Discourse Gamification plugin for periodically competition. For example set it to a time period 1 or 3 month or we can start more and the first 3 members win some stuff and/or award a specific badge. This generates more activity for us and everyone love to play these games. :slightly_smiling_face: Because of this people spend more time on the forum and contribute more than before.

For new members, we add these informations and some popular topic like (introduce yourself, some off-topics etc…) to the first trust level promotion message so they can run in separate competitions and can contribute other great topics if they want.

This is a great way for us to increase their engagement. :slightly_smiling_face:

I think there is a lot of potential in that plugin. For example we set it to solution priority. So the solution worth the most point this way everyone is trying to give quality answers to the questions.

But it’s subjective and does not mean that it will work well in another community at all. It works well for us. :slightly_smiling_face:

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It’ll be interesting to see if they stick around – keep us updated.

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