Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/90487
alumni record updates, and candi- date referrals. Most interesting, the campaign also generated multiple thank- you notes from participants. They expressed their appreciation for having the school reconnect them in such an innovative way, described the number of hours they had spent in Campout, challenged us on nuances of faculty research, and reminisced about how much they enjoyed spending time with Team Fuqua. They also offered suggestions and ideas for future iterations. We held our second campout in March 2012, and we're planning to make the experience an annual event. We've already made some adjustments. For one thing, we couldn't provide a trip to China as the 2012 grand prize, but we did offer an all-expenses-paid trip to Durham to see the basketball game between Duke and the University of North Carolina. The other lot- tery prizes were, again, basketball tickets and tuition for an executive education course. For another, we realized we needed to keep campers constantly engaged. In our second year, we added a daily check-in that focused on basketball and Fuqua; this encouraged people to return every day to score additional points. We've also experimented with the perfect time to hold Campout. In 2011, we ran the event in July, but we thought players might be distracted by vacations and holi- days, so in 2012 we moved it to spring to leverage the excitement of March Madness. However, we had 200 fewer participants in 2012. That could be because people were spending their limited free time following the NCAA games rather 30 November/December 2012 BizEd than visiting the Campout site. Or it might have been because Duke was eliminated early in the 2012 tournament, so some passionate fans might have been "over" bas- ketball just as we were running our event. We will probably launch the 2013 version in February, when people are still excited about the upcoming tournament. Something that worked unex- pectedly well was classmate evan- gelism. We would see interesting pockets of participation from one group, such as the Daytime MBA class of 1995 or the Cross Conti- nent class of 2011, and discover that one person had encouraged everyone else in the cohort to play. Since the first two iterations of Campout both occurred in the 2011-2012 fiscal year, we ana- lyzed the results together. Over the two events, we engaged a total of 1,278 participants, 138 of them repeats. Together they took a total of 19,932 actions to learn about, volunteer for, or otherwise support Fuqua. This translated into more than 100 spreadsheets of volun- teers, leads, and other actionable information we could deliver to key departments in the school. Playdates Elsewhere Duke's Campout was a structured monthlong campaign, but other organizations in the business school industry are using game mechanics in different contexts to create a sense of community. For instance, Beat the GMAT, a social networking site for MBA applicants, awards badges to mem- bers who are the first to respond to a question or who have made a school visit. An Honor Roll on each school's profile shows which site members were accepted into that school. A leader board tracks how much the most popular mem- bers are engaging with other partic- ipants, and progress bars measure how far members have expanded their presence in the community. Other universities are using gamification techniques to design programs for new students. For instance, a significant number of col- leges are supporting their orientation efforts with a technology platform called SCVNGR. While the experi- ence differs at each school, typically students are grouped into teams of diverse membership to interact with classmates across their cohort. One person is assigned to act as the team pilot. Organizers launch the orienta- tion experience by texting clues to the pilot, who leads the team on a scavenger hunt across campus; stu- dents earn credit for checking in at each location. A YouTube video of one such experience, the University of Lou- isville's "Cardinal Challenge," captures the energy of engaged students shrieking as the newest text clue comes in and working together to find their way to the next location. Teams earn points for taking on challenges at each location—for example, answering a trivia question about a facility— and are rewarded as they progress to new levels of mastery. Winners receive priority access to course registration. (See www.youtube. com/watch?v=mm6dMLe5f-w.) How to Score with Gamification For other schools thinking about employing gamification, here are a few simple rules to follow: 1. Be clear about what consti- tutes a win. Articulate a core set of