Reputation Points

Hey Meghan,

Snagged this from one of our strategy consulting members and the 'year one community' hope it helps!

Status levels determine how members progress through the ranks as they earn points. They provide a built-in mechanism to encourage a healthy competitive spirit amongst community members, while also providing insights into a given member’s history within the community. (This is particularly true on a site like eBay, where your decision to make a purchase may be based heavily on the seller’s number of positive transactions.) Consider these best practices when configuring your status level system:

1. Make sure your point accrual strategy reinforces the right behaviors. Assigning a relatively high number of points to creating or liking a status update can encourage less active members to "get their feet wet" through lower-threshold forms of participation (for example, someone too shy to write a blog post might be happy to like a user's status). If you need more content from posts and questions, make it easier to level up if people write more posts/questions. If you have a lot of unanswered questions, adjust the scenario points so that members can accrue faster if they reply to others' posts.
2. Structure your levels to give members an early pay-off, with increasingly steep steps as they move through the levels. (For example, perhaps you only need 15 points to shed your “novice” status, but moving from “senior member” to “expert” requires a leap of 500 or more points.)
3. Use images that indicate progress and communicate that there are award levels yet to be earned. This or this ; not this or . There are a few sets of the progressive-type icons to choose from. Play around with changing the icons to match the overall feel of your community.
4. Provide some transparency into your system, so that users know when they are approaching a new level, and know what activities earn them points. (This can be a delicate balance, however, since too much transparency may make it too tempting for some users to try to “game” the system.) You could do this by posting a document that shows the status levels and points needed to move from one to the next.
5. Think carefully about your community's identity. Is your industry straight-laced or laid back? (If you've got a Fun Stuff link under your Resources, chances are, you've got some leeway.)  How do community members view themselves and how might you tie into those themes?
6. Use playful or meaningful terms when labeling your status levels, if possible. Have fun with it, and your members might be quicker to engage with the system. Consider using status levels to express your community's identity with unique schemes such as color-coded stars, conceptual themes (Rising Star, Super Star, Supernova), or fun terms like Hot Shot or "They call me Encyclopedia." At a minimum, you could change "newbie" to something more nondescript like "member." Status levels can be generic or highly relevant to the community.
7. Foster or discourage competition in the community depending on your culture (or desired culture). It doesn’t necessarily need to be a clear, linear progression, like “novice > intermediate > master.” For companies with diverse groups of employees whose participation might be uneven, to address concerns that the groups with more access or desire to use the system will accrue points faster than others - and thus will appear more senior - consider using contextually relevant terms that are less clearly hierarchical to keep participation fun and less competitive.
8. Reward quality as well as quantity. If you have a question-heavy community or want to encourage question-asking,  a couple ways to bump up point accrual for correctly answered or helpful questions are to 1) change the defaults in System > Settings  > Discussions to make discussions default to questions and 2)  alter the setting for number of helpful answers allowed. You can then increase the points accrued for posting an answer marked as correct or helpful. This technique doesn't make as much sense for communities that are more document- or blog-focused.
9. Acknowledge members of a certain group, for example "Community Guru," by creating a group status level which would apply to all members of a permission group. This status level displays rather than those earned by accruing points (although points continue to add up based on the scenarios).
10. Remember that you can change these levels over time. You'll be able to modify the levels, the point ranges, the icons, etc. as the community expands, and you're not locked into whatever scheme you implement now.

Examples of status level sets