Last night at the Online Community Roundtable, hosted by Webex in Santa Clara, a fascinating discussion emerged: “What does it take to activate participants in an online community?”.

It was agreed that community managers need to tune in to the most important motivators of their individual members/participants/prospectives. To paraphrase the consensus “Every community participant asks themselves 'What's in it for me?' before they contribute to content or help to solve a problem”. Various sorts of psychic rewards systems using ratings, reviews, privileges, prizes, recognition, and other kinds of incentives were reviewed in-brief.

Before committing resources to particular milestones & objectives for a fundraising campaign that employs groups, events, and applications on Facebook, OpenSocial, and other platforms, test (AB testing) the relative appeal of various assets (themes, messages, actors, stories, text, images, video, wikis, audio, speakers) and tools for your campaign on a representative sample of your target audience/engaged membership.

Some set of elements fit together and perform as a whole better than others. Find out which combinations create the best results.

Once testing is complete, estimate: