There's a debate to be had in the world of online communities, especially in the world of online research communities about how we incentivise people to take part. At FreshNetworks, in the online research communities that we build and manage for clients we tend not to incentivise, at least not in the traditional way that we see in market research. So for a community we ran earlier this year with C-level executives from across Europe we didn't incentivise and got high levels of participation. If this had been a focus group or telephone survey, traditional market research would have included incentives (either to the individual or to a charity on their behalf) of over £150. Some other agencies who build and manage online research communities always pay incentives, but as a norm we don't.
I'm currently reading Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational (a great read for anybody who is interested in human behaviour!), and he discusses exactly the reason why not paying traditional incentives can be an effective strategy. We know that humans operate in both the social context and the market context and Ariely shows how the mere mention of money, quantifying an effort, is enough to place an experience firmly in the market context. Take the example of a lawyer who is asked to do some work to help a group of disadvantaged people - offer to pay them a reduced day rate and they will probably say no; ask them to do it pro bono (for free) and they will probably say yes. In the former case they think they are being devalued (a market context), in the latter they know they are doing it for free as a favour (a social context). The mere mention of money shifted the engagement to a market one.
Ariely describes an experiment that throws more light on how to encourage participation. They recruited a group of students to take part in an experiment - they were asked to spend five minutes doing a mundane task (moving a circle on the left of a computer screen into a box on the right) as many times as possible. One group were given five dollars to take part, another 50 cents and another nothing. The outcome was measurable - the more times the circle was put in the square the harder the participants worked. Whilst it was true that those paid five dollars worked harder than those paid 50 cents, it was those who were paid nothing at all who worked hardest.
A second iteration of the experiment strengthened the theory that mentioning money creates a market context. Rather than offering money they offered gifts - to one group a chocolate worth about 50 cents, to another a box of chocolates worth about five dollars and to a third group nothing. Money wasn't mentioned, just the gift that they would received. This time all three groups performed equally.
The outcome from these experiments is clear. The mention of money as an incentive for doing something shifts the context from a social one to a market one. People make a decision of how much they will contribute based on the value they think they are receiving. Without the money (or even with a gift not described in monetary terms), people operate firmly in the social context.
When we are building and managing online communities we want people to take part in the social context. The communities are not market-based transactions, but social environments. Monetary incentives (or equivalents) will only go to create an environment at odds with this. That's why we tend not to incentivise participation in our online communities, we find that we usually don't need to. Where we do incentivise we tend to do so with gifts, information or access - non-monetary offerings which leave people firmly where we want them in the social context.
Some more reading
- How the market research industry should embrace communities
- Social media is not a focus group
- Online research community lessons from MomConnection
- Professor Dan Arieley author of "Predictably Irrational"
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