Retention is one of the biggest challenges in community building. Many platforms use gamification like badges, points, and leaderboards to keep members engaged.
Have you added gamification to your community? If yes, what features did you use, and did it help improve member retention? Would love to hear real examples and results.
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@paulad • May 6, 2025
Short answer: Yes, gamification can significantly improve member retention in community. The purpose of gamification is to tap into users' core motivations like recognition, achievement and progress.
Gamification goes beyond badges and points. A simple "Member of the Month" is a gamification technique that anyone can easily implement. We've introduced it in our community, and it's a manual process. Our moderators nominate 3-5 top contributors of our community for the "Member of the Month" and we select one member as the winner. They get a featured interview and promotion through our social media channels.
I'd like you to study Stack Overflow. They introduced reputation points, badges and privileges to reward helpful behavior. It gives their core users a pull to come back to the community and help others.
I hope this helps.
@kaustubh-katdare • May 6, 2025
I agree with Paula. Gamification works great for user retention, but it needs to align with community's purpose.
In Jatra's own community, we saw a 30% instant boost in engagement after introducing the lightweight Quiz. We are a niche community with a very limited audience; but the engagement boost is real.
Similar to Member of the Month, CrazyEngineers Community had introduced "CEan of the Month" and "India's largest Engineering Project Competition" for students. These activities allowed us to boost retention by about 40% and also improved our sign-up rate by 20%.
One key tip: Please do not make gamification feel gimmicky. It can backfire. If members feel that they're being 'pushed' to creating more content or chasing meaningless points, they'll depart. Gamification should be a natural part of the community experience.
