When I was working as Community Manager and Marketer at Addapp, a mobile health data aggregator app, we fostered an active community with very engaged and advocating users as a result. Users would write in on a daily basis to report bugs and suggestions which tremendously helped our product.  So one day I was wondering how we could reward those existing engaged users and stimulate others to become advocates?

Development & design: external partner
Concept & copywriting: me

How can we reward advocate users and stimulate others to become advocates?

The community we created with our users at Addapp had a very human and playful tone of voice. With that in mind, I decided to create a subjective, ever changing ranking of our most awesome advocate users which got a visible spot on our website.

1. Show off loyal users

I made it very clear we love our loyal users and gave the 10 most loyal ones a spot on this subjective ranking.

2. Update the list regularly & let users know

Each time a user wrote in or helped us, the ranking would change and everyone would be made aware, stimulating users who fell down the ranking to do extra effort. There were only 10 spots on the list, so people regularly fell off the list.

 

3. Gamification & secrecy to stimulate interest

How to make it on the list was purposely kept vague & very subjective to stimulate interest from others to do effort.

4. Opportunity to acquire users

I used very inspirational and fun copywriting to attract new users to download the mobile app as well, even though that was not the main objective.