Adapting Engagement e-mails to Users’ Characteristics

Although some online communities have been able to produce high quality products and to engage thousands of users, community designers usually struggle to engage new users and increase the level of contribution of current users. Some researchers have explored approaches to persuade users to collaborate. An important strand of this research area is based on sending messages to the current users and manipulate the content of the message in order to evaluate their effectiveness. Mentioning the benefits of contributing has been tested, however the results of different studies have been contradictory. One of them have reported a positive effect in the contribution rate, but other one found that mentioning benefits has depressed the level of contribution. Our hypothesis is that the effectiveness of messages may depend on other users’ variables and not in the content message only. To test our hypothesis, we performed a study to evaluate the effect of messages mentioning community and personal benefits in different users’ cohorts. Levels of previous participation in the system and demographic data were tested in order to explain differences in the effectiveness of this engagement strategy.