In the early stages of building a grassroots movement, there are generally no issues with keeping volunteer engagement and supporter motivation high. But with time supporters’ interest and users' motivation tend to fade and the number of active community members decreases. How do successful movements ensure their volunteer retention stays high throughout the whole organization’s existence? One of the tools that can help you achieve this is gamification.
This approach has already proved useful for both for-profit and nonprofit organizations. According to the study done by TalentLMS, around 85% of employees feel that gamification of some elements of their job made them more engaged and productive.
In Qela we have utilized gamification to create volunteer management software that helps organizations and community leaders to retain their supporters. By applying consistent campaign-oriented methodology and using game elements, our clients build successful programs, increase volunteer engagement, and achieve organizational success. Learn more about us here: https://www.qela.app/
How to Deploy Game Elements to Increase Volunteer Retention
Turn Tasks into Quests
Assigning tasks for your volunteers in the form of a game can be a great virtual incentive for them to stay engaged with your organization. By organizing tasks into a series of levels or missions, volunteers can monitor their progress, giving them a sense of accomplishment with each stage they complete. However, it’s essential not to add game elements just for the sake of utilizing gamification. Such an approach can make people focus on their individual gains rather than building a strong community of allied supporters.
Qela’s main product is software that allows grassroots movements to make quests and campaigns connected to the useful tasks one can do for an organization. It works like this: major goals that an organization hopes to achieve become the basis of campaigns. Then they are broken into smaller milestones and filled with quests a.k.a easily attainable actions that supporters can take to help a movement achieve its goals.
Based on the 198 Methods of Nonviolent Action by Gene Sharp, we have created 18 templates that organizations can use to build their campaigns—from signing a petition to organizing campaign events. This approach makes it easier for campaign managers to come up with quests for their community members to have the best player experience.
Rewards system
Rewarding people for their work is one of the most basic and effective strategies to engage them. According to this Independent Sector study, an hour of your volunteer’s time costs around 30$. However, because supporters are typically not paid for their input, it’s important to come up with some kind of volunteer rewards system to make sure your volunteer retention rates are high.
Many organizations employ such game elements as giving their volunteers prizes, organizational merch, and other goods for their input into the organization. However, Qela’s key mission is to highlight the actual reasons why people volunteer — to gain new skills and advocate for social justice or other issues, not win prizes.
Therefore, we came up with two unique reward systems — FREEDOMS talents and Vote Weight.
By completing tasks in Qela your volunteers will gain certain talent points depending on the kind of task they were completing (F — fundraising, R — recruiting, E — endurance, E — eloquence, D — determination, O — originality, M — management, S — savviness). Then later organizations can use those talent points data to target quests to volunteers with specific talents.
Besides that, by completing quests and campaigns, supporters are getting more and more power to influence the decisions that their organization wants them to participate in. We call this solution Vote Weight — it is a sum of a person’s influence points that grows with every completed quest. The more points the person has, the more power over the final decision in the vote they will have.
Educating with Game Elements
If you want your volunteers to actively participate in grassroots advocacy or fight for social justice issues, make sure they understand the roots of the problem they are trying to solve. You can do that by providing them with reading materials and other educational resources. However, research proves that gamified education is much more effective in making people retain the information.
Qela offers a range of educational quest templates — from quizzes to watching online lectures, and many more. Including these quests in your campaigns will ensure that volunteers are equipped with the information on the cause they are fighting for and motivated to engage more deeply with their tasks.
Therefore, such game elements as quests, reward systems, and quizzes can help grassroots movements maintain higher volunteer retention. Qela’s innovative software enables organizations to seamlessly integrate these elements, keeping volunteers motivated and committed to their cause. Sign up here to get a free 30-day trial of Qela: https://www.qela.app/register