Gamification and How to Avoid the Potential Downsides
We are HUGE advocates of gamification (because it’s what we do) and we’ve seen how gamification has helped our clients achieve their goals of building morale in the office, educating meeting and conference attendees and getting participants more interested and engaged. However, if it’s executed poorly, gamification can lead to more headaches than successes. Here are three pitfalls that can doom your gamification plan, as well as ways to avoid them:
Lack of Strategic Connection: Any business owner or leader of an organization knows how essential it is to have a strategic plan in place to produce desired results. If there’s no roadmap for success, your team will likely get lost along the way. The same rings true if you try to implement a gamification plan without a strategic connection to your overall goals and objectives: your participants will likely lose interest and stop playing. If you’re considering gamification, first ask, “Does it make sense to gamify this activity?” If it doesn’t make sense or if you’re having trouble connecting your gamification plan with your overall objectives, it’s time to go back to the drawing board.
Frequency: Too much of anything, including gamification, can cause problems, and if you overdo it, then you defeat the purpose of the exercise. Yes, you want conference attendees, employees or shoppers engaged with your product or service through gamification, however if they’re playing the game too often or for too long you may distract them from achieving the desired outcome you had hoped for. One of our signature gamification platforms, SCANVenger Hunt, can help you dodge this pitfall because it can be customized to have a specific start and stop time.
Quality: If you’re going to use gamification, do it right and that likely means you’ll need to invest money and resources to get a quality gamification product. Sure, you may task your IT department with developing a gamification platform, however they may not have the time or expertise to develop a product that people actually want to play! Not only do we have the experience, resources and technology to meet your gamification needs, we also customize our products so they’re aligned with your overall objectives. We know this industry inside and out, and that means we’ll deliver a quality product that can be adapted for desktops, mobile and tablets.
The SCANVenger Hunt and SCANTrivia platforms provide engagement through gamification, Interactive Attendee Badges, and lead retrieval. Whether you have a conference, trade show or destination driven event our high-tech QR code scavenger hunts, lead retrieval and game components can provide quantifiable value.
Contact us to discuss how we can make gamification work for you!