When and how to use rewards

Rewards are great to keep members of your community motivated, but they shouldn't be the driving force of your community.

Rewards are fully configurable and are worth a specified amount of points. The user can exchange a number of their collected points for a reward of their choosing as long as they have enough points collected.

Your brand values the interactions your advocates create. You can reward your advocates with points for each interaction.

Once they have collected the required points, they can claim rewards. These rewards should be considered thank-you gifts to advocates generating real value. Your advocates should not consider them prizes, and the rewards should most definitely not become the reason why they interact. You don’t want your community to consist of price-hunters who don’t have a natural bond with your brand.

Lifetime points are the total points a member has earned since they signed up. This number doesn’t decrease when members use their points to claim rewards. The icon for lifetime points is a golden star.

We did some surveys to gain insights into the value of points. The suggested value of a single point comes down to 0.02 euro. With that in mind, it is easy to gauge the value of challenges and rewards. For example, something worth 1 euro would be worth 50 points on the platform.

We’ve generated an overview of the available campaigns and their suggested value, which you can find at settings > company metrics > campaign type value metric. To learn more about the relation between points and reporting, click here.

Did you decide to add rewards to your advocacy program? Great! Keep on reading to learn how you can configure and handle rewards.

First of all, open the backend of your account and click on the Gamification tab. Here, you will find the following elements:

This page displays the pending reward requests by your advocates.

For every pending reward request, you can take the following actions:

Contact: you can directly contact the requesting member via email to ask questions or give information about their reward request

When you click "View details," you'll get a detailed overview of the reward request, where you can immediately take action:

Tip: you can also export reward requests via the Export All button.

On this page, you can configure leaderboards, rewards, and goals.

Click here to learn more about custom leaderboards, and read this article to find out more about the goals feature.

In this article, we will zoom in on how to configure rewards.

Next up, you can choose if you want to publish your reward right away after it's fully configured or if you want to schedule it at a later date. You can also set a finish date and/or an archive date:

Form: For certain rewards, it may be convenient to ask the requester for more details. For example, the shipping address or the size or color of a T-shirt. Find out more about reward forms here.

Visible to these people: Rewards can also be targeted to specific people or ambassador groups. For example, an entry ticket for a Marketing conference can be made visible only for Marketing employees and not your customers.

Here you can find an historic overview of all the handled reward requests, as well as the cancelled or refunded requests.

Handled reward requests display the rewarded and closed requests that were set to 'Done'.

Refunded and canceled reward requests display the requests you have chosen to refund or were canceled by the user. (Note: users can only cancel reward requests via the mobile app).

Both handled as well as refunded or cancelled reward requests can be exported via the Export All button.

To manage reward requests in more detail, the following states are available:

Pending and processing requests will be shown in lists of “pending” requests as they still require action. The difference is mainly that a member can still cancel a “pending” request but will not be able to do so once a request is “processing.”