The Business of Belonging

Chapter 5Validation, Rewards, and Incentives

We've now covered the first two stages of the Social Identity Cycle: identification and participation. The third stage, validation, is critical for closing the loop, reinforcing the social identity, and moving members up the commitment curve.

Validation is what tells our brains that an experience was positive and helps us form new habits of identifying with and participating in communities.

In this chapter, we're going to talk about all the different ways that you can reward your members and help them develop a healthy habit of coming back and participating for years to come.

Creating Habits with Rewards

It's absolutely critical that members feel validated and rewarded for their participation if we want them to come back and participate again.

When we experience a reward, it tells our brain that the experience was positive and that we should take that action again. In his book The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg talks about the habit loop, which consists of three steps¹:

1. Cue
2. Routine
3. Reward

Say you want to change your morning routine and replace the habit of snoozing with a habit of running. The alarm going off is your cue, hitting the snooze button is your routine, and the reward is more sleep. So your brain forms this automatic loop where you don't even think about it, you just hit snooze.

Habits are critical for building engaged communities as well, especially online communities. In Chapter 1, we talked about how community can ...