When you plan a trip, you get an allowance for each location. If you stay above, no questions asked, just submit the bills. If you are below, you can select what you do with the money:

• paid out on your next pay check
• saved towards another travel that might not even be have planned
• donate it towards a charity

Rephrasing questions on the survey in a way, that make it more interesting for participants lead to a sharp increase in responses.[..]

A question such as “Describe yourself” yielded on average 2.4  descriptive words, with effectively 85% of respondents answering. When  that question was changed to present the challenge “Describe yourself in  exactly seven words” the descriptors increased to an average of 4.5 and  the response rate rose to 98%.[..]

Our study found that by adding a motive to answer a question we could  improve the response rates. For example, we asked respondents how much  they liked each of a list of music acts. Typically, this yielded  evaluations of 83 artists. Not bad. However, when we asked them to  imagine that they owned their own radio station and to decide which of  the artists they would put on their station’s playlist, respondents were  willing to spend longer deliberating their answers and the average  number of artists evaluated rose to 148.[..]
“When we asked respondents to make a list of their favourite foods, we received an average of six items in response. When we told them they had two minutes to do it, the figure rose to 35” [..]

When we gave respondents a packet of crisps and a series of labels to  describe them, ranging from “well designed” and “good colours” to  “unoriginal”, we produced 15% more activity (in clicks) and 50% more fun  reported by respondents.

• from 2.4 raise to 4.5 descriptive words
• response rate frmom 85% to 98%
• # of artists evaluated from 83 to 148
• from 6 favourite food items mentioned to 35

• User participation up from 68% to 83%
• Community interaction up from 3% to 37%
• Avg. # user posts up from 1.5 to 2.3
• ...

Using game mechanics, blurbIQ turns video commercials from passive to active engagement by overlaying brand and trivia questions on the video. The average number of brand questions answered per 30-second engagement is 3.39.

Up to 5% of visitors end up sharing something with friends. Of these 80% are shared via Facebook, 16% share via email and 4% share via Twitter.

"You would think that interrupting video views to ask brand-related questions would kill user interest. But just the opposite happens. They watch longer, convert at a higher rate and remember more about the brand message. We drive consumers to interact with and understand the messaging of the video," says Scott Reese, CEO of blurbIQ Inc

• interaction rate of 37.97%, a lift of 915% over the "industry average" of the other video vendors of 4.15%
• video completion rate was 65.45% vs. 43.57%
• click-through rate was 2.52% vs. 0.18%, a lift of 1,400%
• Video viewers exposed to blurbIQ's "gamification" have shown +95% unaided brand and key message recall two weeks after one exposure vs. single digits for TV viewers of the same commercial.

A graduate journalism professor from NYU uses multiple game mechanics to engage his students. Among them are leaderboards for social media, where students over the course of 14 weeks to grow their followers, as well as handing in over 20 assignments.

And through a company called Stray  Boots, I organized a Wall Street treasure hunt, in which students  learned the history of the area through playing a walking game.

A report from the 2006 Summit on Educational Games by the Federation of American Scientists found  that students recall just 10% of what they read and 20% of what they  hear. If there are visuals accompanying an oral presentation, the number  rises to 30%, and if they observe someone carrying out an action while  explaining it, 50%. But students remember 90% "if they do the job  themselves, even if only as a simulation."

• Collectively, my 15 grad students correctly answered 77 out of 150  questions (or 51.3%) from the reading passage but for the Treasure Hunt  they got 89 of 150 right (or 59.3%).

LiveOps Inc., which runs virtual call centers, uses gaming to help  improve the performance of its 20,000 call agents—independent  contractors located all over the U.S. Starting last year, the company  began awarding agents with virtual badges and points for tasks such as  keeping calls brief and closing sales. Leaderboards allow the agents to  compare their achievements to others.

• Since the gamification system was implemented, some agents have  reduced  call time by 15%, and sales have improved by between 8% and 12%  among  certain sales agents, says Sanjay Mathur, vice president of  product  management at LiveOps, Santa Clara, Calif.
• Introduction of the platform was met with an 80% adoption rate in the very first week. And these adopters were found to have outperformed non-users by 23%, with an average +9% higher rate of customer satisfaction. Further measurement proved that gamification reduced training from an average of four weeks, to 14 hours. That's over three-and-a-half weeks of earned productivity.

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To launch a new website in the finance sector, the game "Kill the Paper Invoice" was launched.

• Website visits increased by 108.5%
• Unique website visits increased by 99.8%

• Website visits increased by 95.9%
• Unique website visits increased by 81.4%

• 34% increase in membership database
• 9.38% conversion rate from game page visit to data capture
• 19.7% of leader board entrants forwarded the game to a colleague

A community used leaderboards for social adoption & usage

• business usage and adoption increase by 250%

Campaign that generated +100Mio impressions via Facebook & Twitter

• first 3 weeks: 30,000 players
• 3 months: 184,000 players
• 1 in 3 players returned to play again
• Increase in participation by 500%

Gamified Vegetables

• generated 420,000 "likes"

Voting for Miss Social

• doubled consumer base within 4 months
• 85% rate of re-engagement
• 60% improvement in revenues from one month to the next
• Dec. 2010 - March 2011: grew active user base by 80,000

Finding your travel sign racks up over 2 million 'likes'

• 2 million 'likes'

 An innovation game created by the UK Department of Work and Pensions to decentralize innovation and generate ideas from its 120,000 peopl across the organization.

It is a social collaboration platform with the addition of game mechanics, including points, leader boards and a "buzz index".

• Within the first 18 months, the project had around 4,000 users, generated 1,400 ideas, 63 of which hae been implemented within the Department

Automatically determining work performance of employees in restaurants based on criteria such as sales, tips, surveys and customer acquisition data.
“In restaurants, the top 10% of employees add $8.54 to every check. The bottom 10% actually subtract $7.21. In many cases it’s even more extreme. MUSE creates a competitive environment, and in doing so shifts the bottom to the middle, the middle to the top and the top through the glass ceiling – we conservatively predict a 2-4% increase in sales at the outset.”

• 1.8% increase in sales
• 11% increase in gratuities

Chevy Volt uses a simple green / amber indicator (pictured above, right) on the dashboard to give drivers visual feedback on their driving style. If you’re too heavy on the accelerator, the green ball moves up and turns amber. If you’re too heavy on the brakes (preventing the energy recovery system from recharging the batteries) the ball moves down and again, turns amber. The challenge is of course, to keep the ball green, and positioned centrally.

• reduced the number of people exceeding the speed limit in Lanarckshire by 53% during a trial of 226 warning signs

We saw this internally at InsideView when we wanted to drive social media adoption by the company. The only game mechanic we had to put in place was a monthly email that highlighted to most active employees on Twitter. The internal competition to be in First Place drove up the number of updates from employees 312%.

• A newsletter highlighting top employees, Increased the number of Twitter updates by 312%

A group of salespeople who were rarely logging Events. Across the group, they would log about 10/week which is nowhere near what was actually happening or expected. The team felt comfortable in their old ways and weren't behind the change. So we ran a very simple one week sales competition where every Event logged would get a point. Whoever got the most points that week would get $100 gift certificate to a local restaurant for a nice dinner. A contest leaderboard and status updates would be shared daily to keep the team aware of where they stood.

• For the 4 weeks prior to the contest, Events logged/week were consistently around 50.
• During the week of the contest, it shot up to 85.
• For the 4 weeks after the contest was over, Events logged/week held steady around 60 – a 10% increase from the pre-contest results.

Samsung, for example, came to Badgeville hoping to increase the number of product reviews users post on its website. The companies combined forces to launch Samsung Nation, a social loyalty program that lets users earn badges for such activities as writing reviews and watching videos and compete for rewards. By using Badgeville's platform along with its own technologies, Samsung saw a 500% increase in customers' product reviews.

• 500% increase in customers' product reviews

allkpop - an online news site for Korean pop culture (focusing primarily on K-pop – is the infectious Korean brand of pop music).

• During the week long promotion of the game mechanics launch on allkpop, they experienced a 104% increase in shares, 36% rise in comments and 24% more page.
• this has had a long term and sustained impact on traffic levels.

Keas is an Employee Wellness Program that combines the best of social media and online games to create happier, healthier, more engaged employees. It’s time your company joined the social wellness revolution.

• When Keas switched their health behavior-change site to a gamified approach, their user engagement rose 100x (an order of magnitude).

Using the power of online to get teens to do good stuff offline.

• Dosomething.org had a 26% response rate from their teen audience to a scavenger hunt. By comparison, 2-3% of their users respond to “marketing” offers.

Wellvolution (including Shape Up Shield and other programs) is an eight-week-long, social-media-fueled challenge that uses an online platform to let employees form teams, post comments in forums, set team and personal fitness goals, and give virtual 'high fives' for encouragement.

• In the past three years, [..]  80% of Blue Shield employees have participated in at least one of its wellness programs. During that period, there has been a 50% drop in smoking prevalence and a similar increase in regular physical activity among employees. The incidence of hypertension has fallen by two-thirds, and disability claims are down among participating workers [..]
  

That's when he came across Spigit, an innovation management solutions company. Spigit and Gardner's agency gamified government processes by creating DWP's Idea Street initiative in 2007. Through a virtual trading platform, British civil servants could buy and sell stock in new ideas with a virtual currency. What followed was a crowd-sourcing effort that called on civil servants to turn ideation into real cost savings. Those who posted comments and helped execute change could accrue more points, and were even rewarded through promotions. In one case, a call center employee came up with the idea to create internal marketing materials, resulting in that employee's transfer to the office of the head of the DWP.

• In less than nine months, the DWP incurred about $41 million in hard savings by innovating its business processes

As President of CaLLogix, a lean contact center company headquartered in New Hampshire (an expensive geographic area for a contact center), my focus is on being highly responsive to our clients’ changing requirements, delivering exceptional service and managing a profitable company.

Attrition, absenteeism and rising health care costs negatively impact our service and bottom line. Our ability to provide superior service depends on our staff being ready to take the important calls coming into our center.

• reduce attrition by 50% and absenteeism by 80% while cutting our insurance premium increase and improving our overall company performance.

• When 15 people are absent on a single day in a 200 person contact center, we have to scramble to cover the calls those 15 people would have taken. Prior to implementing our Consciousness @ CaLLogix wellness program, we averaged 15 absences each day. Today we average two.

• the company saved $380,000 during the first year of the program – that equates to $2,000 per employee! Further, we haven't had to conduct our usual monthly new hire training in the past 8 months due to big reductions in turnover.