In all companies, I see working together towards achieving goals as very central to the work organisations and its people carry out. In all of my career, I seem to have been supporting those kinds of pursuits whether it was through training, change management consulting, learning design, coaching and mentoring and for most of our projects at Gamification Nation the same focus remains to help people achieve goals together.
In our work on membership communities, we have found the owners often want members to pursue their goals. We know from our experience that tracking publicly often helps people with the very objective of staying on track with their goal. Most top athletes have coaches and trainers and in business, a lot of people have mentors and coaches to do the same.
As an avid fan of tracking, I do like a variety of apps for this purpose from Runkeeper for fitness, to my Apple Watch for general everyday activities and then some self-designed spreadsheets for my business, as I am writing this I am also trialling a time tracking tool.
When communities and companies collaborate, making goal tracking a visible tool helps. It also stimulates a sense of being part of something bigger than you. In my opinion, both individuals should have goals and then team, department and company goals. Depending on your culture you may choose to share them or not.
Coaches and trainers have been goal focused for some time. In my business coaching days, I definitely had clients set goals and then look for ways to achieve them. The ways to achieve them varied depending on the individual and their abilities, interests and commitment.
A lot of membership associations over the years have asked us to help them with goal setting for their members. They see them beneficial to find out which members need support and which ones need praise for moving forward consistently. As a community, there may even be over-arching goals for all members to aim for, in the end, the inspiration behind the community will choose that objective.
To help business owners with online communities on WordPress, we have developed a goal setting plugin. It allows each member to set their own goals and track them, they then have the choice to share this with the community. It is optional to do this. If there is demand from community owners to set some push goals, we are considering it for future updates of the plugin. We are officially launching it with this blog post and you can have a look some of the functionality and buy your plugin from the page below
https://gamificationnation.com/downloads/goal-setting-plugin/
Please let us know your feedback on the plugin and let us know how we can add functionality to it that suits your membership community. We look forward to hearing the great ideas you may have for your community.
