When you're making community plans, list a motivation next to every action you want members to take.
This motivation might be the need to belong and feel part of a group. A member might therefore take actions (make contributions, participate in discussions, create/share content) to feel like they belong to a group.
The motivation might be a need for influence. Members might take actions to be able to affect what happens in the community. They might give opinions on the community, might initiate conversations to feel that they matter.
The motivation might be a need for recognition. They will take actions that seek positive feedback from others. This might be quality responses to discussions, creating expert/advice contnt for others etc…
Every action you want a member to take must be supported by a motivation. The challenge is to identify and subtly use that motivation.
There are three benefits of this:
- It will make you think whether you can find a motivation. You should also judge whether that motivation is really strong enough to support the action you want them to take. The tougher/longer or more complex the action, the stronger the motivation must be.
- It will make you focus on the motivation. You will become an expert on the range of motivations which influence people's behaviour. You will identify very specific motivations to support specific actions. For example, people don't complete a profile for the reasons you expect.
- You can review which motivations are most successful at influencing members to take actions as opposed to which tactics were most successful. When you understand which motivations are more likely to succeed, you can shift your tactics to match.
If you learn about motivations and use them at a tactical level you will be more effective at giving members what they want, which will get you what you want.
