To Notify or Not To Notify, That is the Question! 📧 🙋

Ranks/Ranking is an essential part of gamification.

Ranks are used to see who is actively participating in the community either by sharing content, submitting or answering questions, submitting or voting for ideas, etc. Ranks can drive engagement as well as lend credibility to users and their posts.

No wonder we get creative in coming up with ranks that that our community members can associate with. Along with the rank names/titles we also want to make sure that the points tied into ranks are equally representative of how users will level up to each succeeding ranks.

When it’s time to update ranks in a live community, we come up with cool names, think of adjusting points and the criteria for achieving ranks, but we might forget that if rank notifications via email is enabled, without us thinking about it, our community users will receive an email notification without them necessarily doing anything on their end as they qualify for the newly-adjusted ranks.

For visual reference, this is the section for email rank notifications that can be enabled by default:

Ideally, this can get folks excited about the new ranks, but for some members, these notifications can be a mystery and might generate concerns or worse, spam reports.

To mitigate this, we strongly recommend that whenever you think of updating your gamification mechanics, guidelines, points or rank system, consider first whether you would like your community users to get these notifications or not (and what notifications are being sent – it’s always a good idea to test it out on staging first!)

Before you make updates that will impact ranks, first, stop and think if you would like your users to get these updates.

• If not, to make the necessary updates that will impact ranks but not send an email notification to your community members, you may reach out to support to have the email notification disabled for you while you make the changes. The notification can be turned on again once you are done with the updates. Note: The default notification adjustment will only work if your members have not made any modifications to the notification settings on their end.

• If you do decide to proceed, you will need to make necessary updates that will impact ranks and let your community members know (an announced post should do the trick and have the bonus of generating buzz!), then you may proceed with the updates and your community members will receive email notification as expected. So that users do not receive multiple updates, we recommend adjusting the highest rank first, and working your way down so that users only receive one email.

What do you think? To email or not to email? Do you add any special verbiage in your ranks’ emails?

For more fun information on ranks, checkout this Tip Tuesday from Hannah!