Case Studies
Last updated
Last updated
When running a major marketing push—such as a quest campaign, a giveaway, or a large collab—you often see a surge of new members. The real challenge is retaining them after the initial excitement or giveaway fades.
Discord can be a highly effective conversion platform. The goal on Discord is to make these skeptical members who may or may not be interested in your product to truly care about you. While Discord can be a growth platform, you only see the growth aspect in actions after you have a well established community.
A casual member needs to go through 3 stages to become a superfan
First, send their first message
Second, chat meaningfully and build bonds inside the community
Third, learn about the product while having fun with their friends.
You can ask new members to send some messages on Discord, but they often leave once the giveaway ends.
Engagement drops off quickly because there’s no ongoing reason and rewards for them to keep participating.
Introduce a special role (e.g., WL or OG role) as a redeemable “shop” item. You can customize your rewards directly on our dashboard.
Require members to earn a set number of points (recommend: 20) to claim this special role.
Members earn 15-40 points per day, so achieving the goal keeps them motivated to engage for a sustained period.
Owning the special role makes members eligible for future quests and rewards, increasing their long-term investment in your project.
As you drive more members into the server, make sure to make an announcement and let them know about this Discord specific campaign.
Meaningful Engagement for Free: Since most hype engine quests are related to talking with each other, members tend to make friends.
Higher Retention: About 25%-35% of new members stick around (vs <0.1%) one month post giveaway because they’ve formed genuine connections and see ongoing benefits.
Since it costs members some efforts to get the role, they tend to stay longer and speculate on the rewards.
By engaging daily, some members build a habit of checking in to visit their friends.
Below is a project using us throughout and post their giveaway campaigns and achieve a ~25% retention rate one month later.
Make a manually reviewed custom quest, asking members to create a x thread or a post.
Ask members to share the tweets in public channels: This allows people to show off and members can get inspiration from other people's content
Manually review these comments or Tweets and award bonus points (/award-members) to those who produce high-quality content. Make sure that you reward points in the public channel (premium feature)
Your members need to learn what is good or bad content, by asking members to share their content in public, they can get inspirations
When you reward members with extra points, make sure to mention why they are rewarded the points. This sends two signals to the community members: first, you care about their output and review it manually. Second, you are teaching other members that you prefer one behavior over another.
For example, if you award someone extra points for a funny GIF, you are teaching your members that you appreciate cool artwork.
If you have a #community-content , make sure to comment on member's link directly in the channel. If the channel is filled with links that direct users outside, you don't get meaningful learning discussions. Instead, make sure that you reply some links, discuss why the content is good, or how it can get better inside of Discord to spark conversations.
Remember, your discord members don't know what is a high quality post for you unless you teach them. Discord is a great learning platform to help your member write better content.
Member attrition post TGE is common as initial incentives conclude. The solution to preventing a mass exodus isn't to reinstate unsustainable incentives (or to propose a lesser version), but to reset expectations completely. While you might believe members are solely focused on the next monetary reward and planning their departure, experience shows most people have a broader range of motivations.
Rewards can be a wide range of things:
Vanity-Based Rewards: If you have a strong community pre-TGE, people will still care greatly on vanity driven rewards. In Hype Engine, we give weekly winners a "quest champion" role and make sure that they show up first in our server.
You can magnify the value of a special role by "promoting" those members. For example, allow these special members to post their X link so that others can follow.
Unique Items: Reward users something related to your brands. It can be physical item such as merch. It can also be credits to try your product. For example, give them betting credits if you are a betting site. You can find more ideas on unique rewards in this section.
Transition Discord community from pure social to your platform:
Long term ROI on a community depends on how well it integrates with your actual product. For example, if you are an eco-system, the two direct KPIs are: (1) number of users buying your token and staking it. (2) number of developers continuously building on your tech stack.
Hype Engine Analytics allow you to setup custom quests and track direct ROI related KPIs via our dashboard. See this section below on ideas on custom quests.
Onboarding members to your product is a journey. Remember the three stages of user journey: send the first message, make real friends and then try your product.
Hype Engine pushes easy quests for new users and progressively push more product related quests as users engage more in your community.
Don't forget retargetting. Most of your members will fall off in your product journey at some point. For example, a member can be super active in writing tweets about you, sign up for waitlist but then decide not to stake their tokens with you, (or stake only 5% of their airdrop).
First, reward users for their contributions. You can use Hype Engine API Quests to track their on chain activities automatically.
Second, as you continue to push out social quests related to community engagement, eventually push for harder quests and ask members again to stake more tokens.
With custom quests, you can effectively integrate your product with your Discord. Here are some typical action points that you can ask members to do:
Sign up on your website with social oauth or web3 wallet
Make the first meaningful action.
If you are a gaming community, you can ask users to create a profile and play level 1. If you are a defi project, you can ask members to check out your app. If you are a creator, you can ask member to subscribe to your channels.
First meaningful action is typically easy to do. They are meant as an education opportunity to let users have a broad idea on what you do.
You can ask different members (i.e, different roles) to do different things.
This is extremely helpful if you have a lot of unique characters in your server. At Communityone, since we build for both server owners and community members, we can ask our discord members to do different actions based on their roles. For example, for members with the server owner role, we can ask them to install our bot. For members with community member role, we can ask them to check out their profile page and give us some feedback.
If you want people to give you feedback on your latest product/features/webpage, you can make a quest asking them to give you feedback.
Make an Announcement: Introduce a new product or feature and explain how members can earn points by sharing feedback.
Feedback Channel: Direct them to a dedicated #product-feedback forum, make sure to ask members to post their feedback in this public channels.
Manual Point Awards: Regularly review feedback and use /award-points to give some additional points for insightful suggestions or bug reports
Results
Personalized Recognition: Members feel seen and appreciated for their contributions.
Quality Feedback: Publicly celebrating good feedback can encourage others to chime in with valuable insights.
Community-Driven Development: Builds loyalty and lets super-users take pride in shaping the product.
Customize Shop Rewards: Offer items aligned with your products—like credit toward an exchange platform or in-game rare items.
NFT Roles for Early Testers: Provide NFT-based roles for product alpha/beta testers, granting them extra perks.
Encourage Real Usage: Requiring an account sign-up or deposit for shop rewards drives actual adoption of your product or service. For example, for users to redeem trading credit, they might have to put an additional $5 on your platform.
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