Community Gamification to Boost Your Users' Engagement: Everything You Need to Know

Gamification: How to Motivate and Engage Members of an Online Community
In a Brand Community, having a large number of users is only beneficial if they are genuinely engaged in the project.

Simply put, a community with thousands of members where most only comment occasionally isn’t necessarily more valuable than a smaller one with highly active and committed members.

That’s why you shouldn’t just focus on attracting new users; one of your main goals should be increasing the engagement of current members and encouraging them to take action—creating content, interacting with each other, posting comments, and so on.

But how do you encourage them to do all this? The answer is gamification.

In this article, we’ll explain what gamification is and offer you the solution you need to apply it to your project.

Gamification: The Art of Motivating Through Play
Gamification involves using game elements and techniques in non-game contexts to stimulate motivation, engagement, and participation.

Why does it work so well?

The answer lies in human psychology.

Games activate the brain’s reward system, releasing dopamine—the pleasure neurotransmitter. Every time we achieve a goal, overcome a challenge, or receive positive feedback, we feel satisfaction that pushes us to keep going.

This principle explains why people get so drawn to video games, sometimes spending hours glued to a screen. Gamification leverages this mechanism to encourage desired behaviors and boost user engagement.

Think about how the apps and software we use daily incorporate gamification to keep us motivated and excited, even if their context isn’t strictly playful. For example, many wellness apps include step challenges to motivate users to stay active regularly.

The most interesting aspect for us here is applying gamification within Communities. As we’ll see, this engagement strategy is a powerful tool to encourage users to actively participate in community life.

The Role of Gamification in Community Participation
Community members’ motivation to participate can be intrinsic, extrinsic, or a combination of both.

Intrinsic motivation comes from personal interest or enjoyment in performing actions without external pressure or rewards. For instance, a member motivated intrinsically enjoys contributing to discussions and helping others.

This ties directly to the fundamental nature of Communities: they are meeting places for people who share a common trait (profession, passion, etc.). Naturally, members are inclined to invest time and resources in something they care about.

However, intrinsic motivation alone may not be enough for optimal engagement. That’s where extrinsic motivation comes in—triggered by external factors like prizes, rewards, or recognition.

When community members have both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, they are much more likely to be active and engaged. Gamification is an excellent extrinsic strategy to push users to act when intrinsic factors aren’t enough.

SelfCommunity: The Solution to Implement Gamification in Your Project
After explaining the benefits of gamification, especially for boosting your brand community’s engagement, we want to introduce our solution that makes it easy to integrate this strategy into your project.

It’s the SelfCommunity platform.

By requesting a free demo and exploring our product, you’ll see how SelfCommunity allows you to effortlessly implement gamification features like a loyalty program that awards points to users for actions such as first login and content posting. You can customize which actions earn points and how many, tailoring the loyalty program to your business goals.

Points can be redeemed for rewards that you decide, easily managed through the admin panel.

Additionally, SelfCommunity lets you set up a widget to showcase top users by category, further amplifying your gamification strategy.

These powerful features are just a part of what SelfCommunity offers—our platform can do much more.

Discover all its potential by requesting a free demo and don’t miss the chance to take your project to the next level!