Anyone even vaguely into business trends, especially the tech world, has heard the term gamification. It’s a buzzword because it’s a powerful tool for motivating people to improve or increase behavior. But BNI has always been ahead of the curve. We’ve been gamifying networking since BNI’s start in 1984.
What Is Gamification?
Computer programmer Nick Pelling invented the “deliberately ugly” word gamification in 2002 to describe his use of gaming elements in other applications. His one-man consultancy group helped to bring the word into the mainstream, though the roots of gamification date back further.
Gamification is strongly linked to behaviorism, the psychology discipline that focuses on changing behavior. It’s most associated with positive reinforcement and its oft-misunderstood cousins, negative reinforcement, positive punishment, and negative punishment.
Today, it’s frequently spoken about in the context of apps. People use gamification in education, employment, and much more. It also creates loyalty by activating the reward areas in our brains.
For example, Waze has grown as a navigation tool primarily by offering rewards and tiers that people can increase as they use it.
Similarly, the weight loss app Noom uses rewards and progress to gamify health.
However, here’s a necessary clarification. You don’t need technology to access the benefits of gamification! Teachers, parents, and animal trainers have been gamifying behavior since before the internet age. And though today we’ve entered the modern age, so has BNI!
How Does BNI Gamify Networking?
Since its founding in 1984, BNI has encouraged its members to improve their networking games through friendly competition and tracking of its most provably valuable facets.
Today those facets are tracked in the BNI app in modern networking gamification fashion, but when BNI began, it was all on paper slips.
Gamifying Networking Elements
At BNI, we believe in the Power of One. We realize that, out of context, it either sounds like something to run away from or is some generic feel-good fluff, but in BNI, it has a more specific meaning.
The Power of One is what we reach when someone in a BNI chapter pulls their weight by meeting several specific criteria:
Attendance
They say, “Showing up is half the battle.” SO attendance is a key pillar to the Power of One. We require members to show up to weekly meetings. Without being there, you miss the opportunity to learn and get to know other members of your chapter and their businesses.
At the same time, we know life is complicated! That’s why we allow members to send substitutes if they must miss a meeting and also allow up to 3 absences in a rolling six-month period. Getting sick doesn’t count as an absence.
One to Ones (Meeting with Other Individual Members)
Meetings with other members of the group are where you get to see the real power of networking. The Power of One asks for members to commit to at least one meeting per week with another chapter member.
Qualified Referrals
We’re all in BNI to grow our businesses and each other. We do that with qualified referrals, which leads to other individuals who have already said they’d like to hear from the refer-ee. BNI asks members to, whenever possible, bring at least one qualified referral per week.
Continuing Education Credits
Lifelong learning is one of BNI’s core values. As such, we put a lot of focus on eductation. Every chapter has an education coordinator who shares one relevant networking education lesson each week.
But members are also asked to complete 1 hour of continuing education each week. That may sound like a lot, but if you break it down into a short BNI podcast, that’s only 1 12-minute podcast each weekday!
Remaining engaged in education helps our members to help each other.
Visitors
Lives change, and as people move away, change careers, or reprioritize their lives, members leaving a chapter is natural. That’s why visitors are key to not only the growth of a chapter but even its continued existence.
We ask that our chapter members bring at least one visitor each month.
Gamifying Networking Makes it Fun
By gamifying networking, BNI has increased its members’ participation for 4 decades, growing into the world’s largest networking organization!
And the best part is that you win the game by helping each other! The “winners” are helping others to win and build their businesses.
That’s the BNI difference.
