The RedesignMe community consists of over 4200 members and is growing every day. Our members have many different backgrounds and expertise and this variety generates an enormous potential for companies and the members themselves.

Measuring motivation
Our community is a creative motor solving problems and generating ideas for our clients. Ofcourse we aim at providing a good and motivating online environment so that the power of the community can harvest its full potential. When we extend our tool’s functionality and make changes to our site we want to avoid guesswork. Our user metrics, discussed in the previous post, give us lots of information on what users do, but not really why they do it. Therefore it is very important to get answers from community members directly.

To get these answers we recently did a little research amongst our members. We wanted to know what motivates them to participate, and how they feel while spending time on our site. The following are outcomes of discussions we had with our members and the result of an extensive survey we sent to our entire community.

Rewarding is key!
Receiving RDMs for a Redesign scores very high on motivation to stay active in the community. Not necessarily because RDMs can be exchanged for money, but because receiving RDMs proves the quality of the contribution. Members who contribute to a Challenge feel appreciated when the quality of their contribution is recognized, especially when that appreciation comes from a community manager working at the company. Receiving money for contribution proves to be of lower priority.

Feedback is key!
Members who receive positive (and negative!) feedback on their Redesigns feel, on average, more compensated for their work. Positive feedback as well as negative feedback motivates members to improve their contribution and/or create another one. This means that all feedback on a Redesign or comment has a positive influence on the motivation of the creator.

Conclusion
This clearly underlines the importance of community managers. Feedback is the core of co-creation; co-creativity lives on feedback from stakeholders. Without decent feedback motivation drops as well as the number of contributions to the Challenge.