Tip: Sending personal 'thank you videos' and gifs to your (potential) super-users / experts

  • 7 November 2018
  • 5 replies
  • 301 views

Hi all,



As community team we are always looking for new ways to show our appreciation to our community members. Several months ago we started experimenting with sending our members 'milestone' videos. When a member reaches a certain milestone and/or achievement we record a personal YouTube video thanking them for their effort. In the video we introduce them to our team (if they haven't met them yet personally ), show them the work surroundings and really try to convey our gratitude.



The feedback from our members have been overwhelmingly positive. They really appreciate the personal touch. A lot of users state that these gestures are worth more than badges, ranks or incentives and that they are really caught off-guard (in a positive way).



Tips video:



-We first considered making a sleek studio video, but choose to make it more ‘amateurish’. I believe this makes it more personal.. shows the room as it is (messy, my bad) and it doesn't look staged. This makes the video personal and spontaneous (WYSIWYG!)



-Pick one or two specific achievement and highlight it in the video. Make a remark about a specific post he or she posted or reminisce about the first time the user posted something.



- We don’t stage it too much, but I always start with a personal introduction (CM), short thank you (e.g. # posts / # best answered), introduce the team, highlight why we are so happy with him/her. The last part is important, because thanking someone for #posts is a bit clinical. Create personal context and make a reference to something in particular.



Tips gifs

-Make a couple of boomerangs or gifs you can e-mail at smaller milestones (e.g 50 / 100 / 200) etc. Easy to make and with a high impact



-We always try to round-up extra colleagues (other departments) for the gif shoot. This is a fun way to involve other colleagues, but also gives the gif more ‘oomph’.



- You can add the gifs to automatic rank achievements (if you want) -> automatic e-mail / PM





So.. something worth considering if you aren't already doing it 😉



Still from video





(gif from video)





Milestone gif/boomerang (e.g. 100/500/1000 post)


5 replies

@Julian : can you add the gifs to the post (because of the gif platform issue)? And change the topic to conversation please 🖖🏻.
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Good stuff, we've done similar things to recruit new superusers and to enrich our messages :)



Screen cap of one of our invitation videos:







Gif:





To keep your page lightweight, it's important to resize and optimize your gifs. Google doesn't like heavy pages, so that's something to be wary of.



Also, to add gifs to PM's, don't we need this idea to be implemented first? https://community.insided.com/got-an-idea-39/we-should-be-able-to-include-images-pictures-in-pm-s-107
Thanks for sharing your tips @Jurgen !
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Hey Niels,



I was travelling last week, so it took me a while to get back to you.



Really awesome post, happy that you shared it here with us! That is a great idea to give your most valuable members a very personal "Thank you", I like it a lot. I can understand why your users are appreciating this much more than a standard message, as it comes as a surprise and shows your gratitude in a nice way... I have done the changes as you asked me. ;)



Also thanks to Jurgen for sharing your thoughts, good points you made there. For PM's it would also work to include the link (as long as this improvement has not been implemented), I am sure users will not mind clicking on a link instead of having it embedded, at least in this case.



We would always keep an eye on our super users' statistics, so that we can congratulate them in a personal message (sometimes even with a personalized pic) in our super user lounge.



I remember seeing others even highlighting a user in a special topic / announcement, praising a users' achievements and milestones in public on the community. It can also work good as an advertisement/inspiration for others to become more active themselves.



One of our superusers on the TomTom Community was so active that he received a free TomTom device including a personal message from the CEO, as he was really impressed with this user hitting the 30.000 post mark. Slightly more expensive to do (not really though, given all the answered questions), but surely well deserved by this super user!



Keep up the good work guys!
Hey this is a great topic as we have a number of active users now and are trying to look at ways of recognising them more to keep them active!







Definitely going to borrow/steal a few of these ideas!!!!

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