#TipTuesday: Are you recognizing your Top Contributors?

Joan_Nnah

You’ve taken on the arduous task of starting and building an online community.

You successfully gained the by-in from your Internal stakeholders, endured the months of implementation, successfully went live, started hosting community events.

What’s even better?

Your members are engaging and you’re starting to identify your MVP’s!

But you're not recognizing them or giving a shout out to them for the work they do in the community.

You’re dropping the ball if you’re not doing this, and Vanilla has a useful widget to make this possible, but before we discuss this widget, here are my Top 3 reasons for recognizing your members.

https://media.giphy.com/media/JU7wXXaDEsy7YzO0sI/giphy.gif

1. Recognizing community contributions is not only a nice gesture, but also a strategic move that can help you achieve various objectives. It can motivate and retain your community members by showing them that you value their input and feedback, as well as encourage more participation and engagement. 
2. While every member that joins your online community has a shared interest or goal, that doesn’t mean everyone will have the same investment level. You will have some members that go the extra mile in responding to questions and you want to score them an A for this!
3. It goes without saying that recognition builds advocates for your Brand.

Here's how this Vanilla feature can help you do this.

Your Vanilla Foundation Theme (reason 671987287382731765132 to move to foundation) has a User spotlight widget that is incredibly easy to add to your community layout.

Head into your dashboard and into your custom layout. Select the position you'd like this widget to take and click on it, We have the user spotlight widget below.

When you click on the widget, it opens up this

Feel free to edit the description and give your widget a different title that is synonymous with your Brand.

Lastly, make sure you communicate this new initiative to your members before you start. Let them understand why it is important to your organization and see it as a value add.