Getting your users to contribute interesting content is a great way to build authentic, meaningful and transparent relationships with your community.

The dominance of social media, forums, comment sections and boards has made the internet a social place. People trust feedback, ratings and reviews over marketing spiels, and media outlets now use threaded comment sections with up and down-voting systems that attract as much engagement as the articles themselves.

Marketers have long capitalised on user-generated content (UGC) to deliver engaging, positive content that stands out from the crowd. We know that people are more likely to engage with each other than with a faceless brand, authority or department, and tools that facilitate creativity, passion, conversation and new ideas from users can yield interesting and inspiring results.

Sourcing UGC is a great way to engage the public in authentic and transparent ways, build interest and trust and gain deeper insights into your audience. It can also be a great way to encourage creativity in the engagement process, allowing people to contribute media such as images and videos.

UGC helps engagement practitioners build authentic relationships with participants - something crucial to a successful engagement process. It’s a great way to facilitate passion for community and place-based projects, identify advocates and influencers, and recognise and/or reward valuable contributions.

Gather

The HiVE’s Gather tool allows users to create and share their content in the form of text, images and videos. It can be used to collect stories and experiences from the community, or to gather ideas for solving an issue or problem.

Gather creates a social experience by allowing participants to make comments and up or down-vote other user contributions. This creates opportunities for public dialogues, voting processes and sentiment pulse-checks. Different categories can be created, so users can tag their contributions to create multiple content streams.

Gather can also facilitate a range of competition processes - an excellent way to activate the community. Using ‘feature’ tags, individual contributions can be given labels such as ‘People’s choice’, ‘Winning entry’ or ‘Runner up’. This can be used to showcase competition winners or highlight top contributions and exceptional ideas or imagery.

Combined with the user voting functionality, Gather makes running community-based competitions easy. We used Gather in a mock children's art competition to demonstrate how the tool can be used to engage with children in a fun and creative way.

VicHealth’s Top Spin project was an excellent example of a project that used Gather to inspire broad participation from an audience often regarded as ‘hard-to-reach’.

Top Spin encouraged young people to critique the tactics big alcohol uses to target young people and fuel Australia’s booze culture. The project took the form of a weekly competition judged by a panel of young people, creative practitioners and public health experts.

The competition ran for five weeks in May and June, attracting thousands of visitors and collected over 250 entries, some of which were of extremely high quality.

Top Spin is an outstanding example of how UGC can yield interesting and thought-provoking results.

Try it for yourself

Gather is a premium tool of The HiVE, so existing users can jump right in and start using it. If you’re interested in seeing how Gather can be used to source great UGC or just want to see the tool in action, check it out on our demo site.