Volunteer Recognition Program

[mad_cat]

I saw an episode of Extra Credit talking about Gamification of school and I thought we might be able to provide the same ideas of Gamification to volunteering.  This would work to recognize people who donate money or their hard work, and allow people to get mention but others who do more get more recognition.

Basically it works as each person who does anything for us getting the rank of Recruit.  From here, each of their actions earn experience points.  For a rough example, say that liking us on Facebook gets them the basic rank of Recruit.  Then we have a variety of actions, such as linking us on twitter (10pts), posting on our forums (10pts), donating money (10pts for every $5), rating a pic (1pt per pic).  When they gain enough points, they are moved up to the next rank.  As they gain more points, they gain additional ranks, and get higher listing on our website volunteer page.  It's a friendly competition between donators and people can be recognized for their hard work and move up the ranks.  Now it is more of a glory thing than anything else, but there is much we can do with this.  Like you get 500pts for doing programming for us, or during our kickstarter campaign, gain a rank for a different tier.

As with any ranking system, early ranks should be easy to get, so perhaps Rank 1 takes 10 points, where rank 2 is 30 points, Rank 3 is 50 point, then further ranks get harder, such as Rank 4 is 100, Rank 5 is 200, Rank 6 is 500, Rank 7 is 700, Rank 8 is 1000 point.  We can go as high as we need to and create more ranks as needed.  Perhaps even offer special prizes for different tiers to recognize our top volunteers.  Rather than getting a name on the website, this gives some incentive to want to do more for us, even if it is to get another rank.

We are trying to get gamers to volunteer their time to help change the world...why not use elements of gaming they are familiar with to further encourage them?

Thoughts?

[mad_cat]

Link to Extra Credit's video: http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/gamification

[Peter Mosur]

Hey these are great ideas,

I'm not sure how we would utilize all of these volunteers though. Spreading the word may be something, but then again journalists do a great job at this. I think that once we get the plugin into beta and an interested game developer, we could definitely utilize these ideas more with the actual tagging systems.

[mad_cat]

In this modern age, nothing spreads faster than social networking websites.  Linking the website to facebook can also help with that, and when people gain ranks, it can update their facebook.  This essentially would be giving us a shoutout.

Implementing this would not be easy and would require a web developer.  I am good friends with one, though to use his services would cost money.

While we can't use the volunteers at this time, we can on our own keep track of a few users.  Having a forum on the main website, we can easily keep track of forum posts, and anyone who is brought in for specialty service, such as programming, we can give them points.  While we don't have to do this right this second, I think as we move forward, we should implement this as a major component for what we are doing.  That is my opinion of course.  No reason we can't keep an excel sheet somewhere keeping track of this and that until a system is put into place.