Anyone ever run promotions to launch your community?

Community
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I’m thinking of different ways to run a promotion for our new discourse community launch and was wondering if many others have done this and what was learned from it. Was it successful? What type of issues did you run in to?

One of the ideas that I was thinking of doing was making the promotion tiered and tying them in to badges to be earned with different prizes offered for achieving the different badges. For example, an elusive gold badge being awarded for logging in x amount of days, having y amount of posts created, z amount of likes given/received, and then a silver badge for amounts less than that, and then bronze for even less than silver. Each badge could be equal to a gift card amount or something. Not sure. With it being the launch of the community, I don’t want to make it too complicated so perhaps throwing the badges at the new members may not be the best approach so early on since they may not even be that well educated on the new platform, let alone the badges.

Anyway, just curious to see if others have run any successful promotions in the past and trying to learn from that experience.

I look forward to hearing from y’all!

5 Likes
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I suggest you might be better off with contests that focus on creating interesting topics or posts rather than absolute quantity. For example rather than

  • Post 50 times and get a free prize

something like

  • Share your most interesting story about {x} in this topic and the best 3 stories will get a prize

Or multiples of the above, variants of the above, where {x} is something topical and interesting to your community.

14 Likes
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Great ideas, thank you for your feedback! I had shifted my original plan to one where people share their successful experiences instead, hopefully people will enjoy this format a bit more and make it more encouraging to participate.

2 Likes