Hello Morgan,
This is great! 
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. 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.
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.