I had a great discussion with Jack Vinson of Knowledge Jolt on the intersection of Communities and Knowledge management. More on that in a seperate post, but here is an idea that I had after our discussion on how to motivate community members to help others.

He mentioned about a company UOP (a Honeywell company, in the manufacturing segment, has been around since 1914) where there was a serious problem due to many years of hiring freezes. A significant percentage of their employees had reached retirement age. UOP wanted to capture the knowledge, skills and best practices (know how) from these retiring employees so the company would benefit going forward.

Each new employee was assigned a mentor to learn from. The key difference was that to the retiring employees this was positioned as “Leaving a legacy”. The program had an excellent success ratio and over 70% of the retiring employees felt engaged and helped with the effort.

How can you apply this to your community? Why not find your own motivating positioning for your participants and have the tenured community members help the newer ones. Find your own “leaving a legacy” positioning, and you will find that it encourages more participation than paying $20 starbucks cards like one of our clients did before we discouraged that practice.