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How to Boost Volunteer Retention with Gamification Techniques and Game Elements?

How to Boost Volunteer Retention with Gamification Techniques and Game Elements?

In the early stages of building a grassroots movement, it's easy to keep volunteer engagement and supporter motivation high. However, supporters’ interest and user motivation tend to fade with time, 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 tool that can help you achieve this is gamification.


This approach has already proved useful for both for-profit and nonprofit organizations. According to a study by TalentLMS, around 85% of employees feel that gamifying some elements of their jobs makes them more engaged and productive


In Qela, we have utilized gamification to create volunteer management software that helps organizations and community leaders 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 to utilize 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 create quests and campaigns connected to 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, e.g., easily attainable actions that supporters can take to help a movement achieve its goals. 


Based on Gene Sharp's 198 Methods of Nonviolent Action, 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 create quests for their community members to have the best player experience.


Reward 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 develop some kind of volunteer rewards system to ensure your volunteer retention rates are high. 


Many organizations employ game elements such as giving their volunteers prizes, organizational merch, and other goods in exchange for their input. 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 to win prizes. 


Therefore, we devised two unique reward systems — FREEDOMS talents and Vote Weight.  


Completing tasks in Qela will earn your volunteers certain talent points depending on the kind of task they are completing. Every letter in FREEDOMS stands for a different type of skill: F—fundraising, R—recruiting, E—endurance, E—eloquence, D—determination, O—originality, M—management, S—savviness. Later, organizations can use that talent point data to target quests to volunteers with specific skills. 


Besides that, by completing quests and campaigns, supporters gain 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, ensure they understand the roots of the problem they are trying to solve. You can provide them with reading materials or other educational resources. However, research proves that gamified education is much more effective in helping people retain information


Qela offers a range of educational quest templates, from quizzes to watching online lectures and 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.


 

Such game elements as quests, reward systems, and quizzes can help grassroots movements retain more volunteers. Qela’s innovative software seamlessly enables organizations to integrate these elements, keeping volunteers motivated and committed to their cause.


Sign up here to get a free 14-day trial of Qela: https://www.qela.app/register

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