Years ago while taking a basic management class, I remember a lesson about motivating employees. People are motivated in 4 ways. It doesn’t matter if it’s a forum, or a job flipping burgers, people fall in to one (or more) of these categories. Knowing how to motivate each group is one key to a successful forum.

• Money - In the business world, these are people who are motivated by financial rewards. If they work harder, they’ll make more. In the forum world, members motivated by money are the ones who participate in contests. Or contribute when there is some sort of monetary reward involved. Since most of us aren’t paying our members or staff, you have to find ways to cater to the money motivated individual. Start discussions about money related topics. Offer content to help these members advance in their careers or businesses. But most importantly, conduct contests on a regular basis to keep these folks around. Most people have some form of money motivation, but there is a small group that could care less about contests, giveaways, etc. Often times these are members who fall in to the self-worth category.
• Self-Worth - Members who are driven by their own self-worth can be the best thing because it involves little or no effort on your part. These are the folks that put “self motivated” on their resume and mean it! They’ll go out of their way to help, contribute, and participate and don’t expect or even want a “Thank You” or a fancy member title. They are usually modest and would prefer to stay out of the lime light. It’s best just to send these members the occasional “Hey, just wanted to say thanks for everything you do” type PMs.
• Recognition - We all love a little pat on the back from time to time, but members motivated by recognition need that pat constantly. They want the special member badge and the fancy title. They love the “Thanks Yous” and “You Rock!” messages and they want everyone to see that. It’s pretty easy to motivate this type of person. Create some special member groups, give out awards or member badges. Anything to set this person apart from the crowd.
• Advancement - One step past recognition is advancement. In business, this is the employee who is always striving for that manager position or trying to get a promotion. They’ll work their butts off to get it, but if they never advance, they probably won’t stick around. These are tough in the forum world because you can’t make everyone a moderator. Find other ways to advance these members with special member groups. You might give them some basic privledges if they deserve it. Keep advancing them and they’ll stick around and continue to contribute to your community

So those are the 4 motivators and the people that fall in to them. Once you can identify things to motivate each of these individuals, you’ll be on your way to a bigger and better community. One of the best things you can do is talk to people. Get to know your regulars and find out what motivates them. You want to keep them around don’t you?!

A very well known WebmasterWorld moderator, Martinibuster, has written an excellent blog post about Growing Forum Participation. For the WMW member’s he also posted an excellent summary of the blog post at Growing Forum Member Participation. I felt his thoughts were definitely worthy of a mention here as he truely learned from his own experiences.

He takes time to explain how he came to the conclusion that when running a forum you need to spen more time promoting discussion, rather than simply offering answers to question. After all a forum is about online discussion, right?

Here is an excerpt from his blog post:

An interesting phenomenom
My top forum member accepted a new job that limited his ability to post on my forum. Our top forum member, who expertly answered so many questions was now gone, which was a huge loss for the community, as so many members looked up to him because of his deep knowledge.

Now here’s the funny part: The average count of daily posts began to rise shortly after he left. So what happened? Other very competent members stepped out of the shadows to fill the space formerly occupied by my star member.

Too many askers
Although the forum was growing month over month, many of the members were coming to ask questions and lurking thereafter. So while my unique visitor metrics were growing, the number of enthusiastic active members was not. Too many askers.

Should a Forum Avoid Giving Out Answers?
Apparently, his style of posting comprehensive answers had been inhibiting others from posting their own answers. Is there something wrong with answers? I think so.

Some members had expressed timidity about posting answers, so my way of circumventing this timidity was to instruct my moderators to stop answering questions, and begin engaging in dialogue.

Encouraging Lurkers to Post
My instructions to the moderators was to draw the lurkers out of lurk-mode by consciously making posts that encouraged members to offer opinions and answers. No more answers. Only discussions.

This community is overwhelmingly made up of lurkers. This is common to many forums, but I think there is an opportunity to cultivate more active members by taking a look at posting styles and de-emphasizing answers, and emphasizing discussion.

About lurkers and drawing lurkers into the open
So why do people lurk? Fear of being ridiculed is probably one of the major reasons. The other may be a lack of confidence in their knowledge, and perhaps the most important, nobody’s ever engaged them for their opinion.

Making eye contact online
On that last point, some of my favorite personalities both on and off the boards share a quality that when they speak, they seem to embrace the whole room with eye contact, a nod, a little encouragement for your feedback. I think it is precisely this quality that is missing from many board discussions, the encouragement for feedback. A simple question such as, “What do you think?” Or, “I think that’s right, but I’m sure others have good opinions of other ways of doing it. I’m interested in hearing yours.”

I wanted to highlight a VERY important factor in the world of online forums that is very often overlooked by 95% or more of forum administrators. I want to discuss the need to communicate with your membership with an email newsletter. This is something that you can put together in 1-5 hours on a monthly basis that will provide great benefit to your community, no matter how big or small. For some reason, only about 2-5% of the forum owners / administrators I talk with are doing this. I ask them, “Why not?!?!”

For those that are wondering about the effectiveness of doing this, let me share what I have seen on some of my forums. When our monthly newsletter (in html format) is sent out at Sprint Users I typically see a 35-50% increase in members online the day of the email, and a 10-20% increase in members online the following 2-3 days. For that forum, that equates to hundreds of additional members online for a stretch of 3-4 days. On a small automotive forum that I used to co-admin, we would see 15-30% gains in the number of members online, and this was a forum that had less than 200 members. No matter how big or small you are at the moment there is obvious benefit to doing this. At the very least, you are offering good information to you userbase regarding industry news, community updates, or interesting article written by you or your volunteer staff having to do with your topic of discussion.

I will always recommend that you put together a nice html newsletter and use a service like Aweber or NetAtlantic to handle the bulk emailing, but you simply must start somewhere. If text emails are where you begin, great…just begin somewhere! If you are a vBulletin user, then even the CommBull (Community Bulletin) modification would be a good starting point. I hope this has been encouraging and given you a bit of a push to improve upon the hard work which you have undertaken.

I wanted to take a brief moment to reiterate the fact that developing “community spirit” is a must in growing a successful forum. I just got an email from a fellow admin that had a major issue amongst the members that really destroyed his community. Not having the people, the community, behind you as an administrator will absolutely prevent forward progress. I like to liken it to a crowd watching a sporting event. When the crowd is pumped up and excited, it only helps to further motivate the team they are rooting for. As an admin trying to grow a forum, you need all of the help and support you can get. Having a group of people, no matter how large or small it may be, that support the forum and the staff is a huge help. Win them over at all cost through kind words, good topics, fun contests, and so on!

I am just coming off of the Small Business Trends radio program where I discussed “Building a Successful Forum”. One of the questions that came from Anita Campbell was, “What is in it for a moderator? Why do they do this work for free?” I thought it was a perfect question to expand on here today.

I think there are many reasons a moderator finds their time spent volunteer moderating productive and enjoyable. First of all, as a volunteer staff member they become the face of the community. They can take pride and a sense of ownership having a position of authority on the forum. I have seen this turn out to be a bad thing, but by far it is a very good thing. There is fantastic upside to finding a quality moderator that will enjoy his / her work and time spent on the forum.

Secondly, since the forum is likely a passion of theirs, they will share the administrations passions for the site and want to see it grow to its potential. As the site grows, they have a feeling of accomplishment as they are partaking in the site’s success. Basically, it comes down to the moderator sincerely caring for the forum and desiring to build it to a success. That is a winning combination!