Jamie Brooker is Co-founder & Lead Designer of Kahoot! – a game-based classroom response system. Working on any device, it creates an engaging learning space, encouraging both educators and learners to ask great questions, and share their content globally.
It’s almost 3 months on from our free public beta launch, and the Kahoot! platform currently has 15,000+ users a day (and counting!). This article is designed to share some of the strategies we’ve been using to attract users, maintain a happy community and create a global group of evangelists connecting and sharing on our behalf. Hopefully there’s a little bit for everyone to take away, from branding, to marketing and product development.
Children enjoying using the Kahoot! platform
Experiment!
We run experiments every week to see if we can attract new users, optimise the experience and engage our existing users further. But, with a small team there’s only so much you can do – so we “fake” new features based on hypotheses, to see if they would be worth implementing in the future. Often, this is simply by putting a button in! For example, we knew that teachers wanted to sign their students up to create their own Kahoots, and realised they often create student accounts themselves – so we offered to save them time and do it for them. Before we knew it, we had users sending us spreadsheets containing 500 new accounts to upload.
Often, the experiments which seem the most contrary are the most successful ones. We decided to allow users to play a game of Kahoot! without needing an account, which had two positive results – 1) more people were experiencing Kahoot! first and then making the decision to sign up, and 2) more people were sharing the content they had created across their social channels for others to play, thus increasing the organic growth.
This also allowed us to seed some of our platform content across forums, articles and social media as individual experiments targeting different communities based on interests. For these, we use Google Analytics tracking codes to measure their individual success. It’s important to understand where users come from, and where they may go when they’ve finished to see if that’s something that can be influenced.
Jamie Brooker and Johan Brand from Kahoot!
Capture data, track it and monitor engagement
Tracking behavioural data is vital for understanding usage. However, for an early stage company, having the tools to report these can be difficult, so make use of what you have. We use simple spreadsheets, HTML files which spit out data, and of course Google Analytics. It’s by no means pretty, but it does the job in helping us understand engagement levels, user retention and experiment success.
Our ‘User engagement funnel’ illustrates the different levels of engagement users can have with Kahoot! – from the easy-to-do, low motivation features up to the harder-to-do but higher motivation ones. We then plot our figures on this, and use results to design features to encourage our users to invest more time on the next level of engagement.
Of course data can be used to provide rewards on your platform… Speaking to a gaming community, I may be preaching to the choir on this, but we found it to be as important for retention of users on a platform as it is “in-game”. We use frameworks such as BJ Fogg’s behavioural model, and Nir Eyal’s “The Hook” to design features that reward (both internally and externally) users more substantially for their greater time investments. These deeper engagement loops often have more viral potential too and need a mechanism to trigger them, such as a notification system.
Data is also a great thing to share PR wise – some of our most Re-Tweeted Tweets have come when we’ve shared our usage stats, because our users feel ownership of them – it’s something they’re significantly contributing to.
Feature your users
We maintain a list of Kahoot! “evangelists” – the users we’ve had the most interaction with, the ones who are pushing it to its limits, spending the most time, or helping us spread the word – and use this information on our blog, in newsletters and social media to turn them into stars. It’s a way of thanking them – but crucially, also encourages others to follow suit.
You can make your life easier by writing email templates for specific conversations, but always make sure to leave a paragraph for personalisation – it matters! For example, we created a space on the platform to feature the best user content, and we always follow up by sending a personal email informing and thanking the creators.
A sample question on the Kahoot! platform
Social media is the most likely place you’ll be discovered
Conversations will happen anywhere, it’s vital to be aware of them – it really shows how much you care by joining in, showing gratitude, offering help and asking them to share their experiences. We have relevant searches set up on every social platform. This is where you learn the most about how your platform is used, see who you’re being compared to and find out how people perceive you. Often a Tweet from one of the founder’s personal accounts will make a user’s day.
The teaching community in particular is amazing on Twitter: so engaged and willing to share new ideas. Sometimes it can be hard keeping on top of it – but along with support it’s one of the best investments in time you can make. There’s a lot of talk about how social media should be used in the classroom – we’ve found that Kahoot! can act as a gateway to educators becoming more social. It’s a naturally social platform, and often users dedicate their first Tweet to us! Embrace this, and encourage it. Often those with less of a “following” can be your greatest evangelists.
For us, this approach has lead to countless stories, pictures and videos being made, our users presenting us at conferences, TeachMeets and personal development sessions and new articles being written by the day.
Embrace the support ticket
Support shouldn’t be a hindrance; it can be a competitive advantage. It can be the excuse you need to start a dialogue with that specific user. Support tickets are inevitable (although we’re proud to only get a few a day… currently!) and natural when you’re scaling, whether it’s through a bug, server issue or lack of user understanding. We treat every communication as an opportunity, and more often than not support tickets lead to positive PR. We also run a separate Twitter account for support, and intercept conversations which are related to performance or lack of understanding, pre-empting issues by Tweeting them out.
Allow users to suggest features
An engaged user base will always have new ideas for how they’d like to see your product work just for them! We provide functionality to share these ideas through UserVoice, and strategically implement the requests that stay strong to our vision (let users personally know you’ve implemented them too!). Cultivate the community by allowing other users to comment and vote for their favourite new ideas – and always encourage this through your conversation channels.
Jamie and colleague Alf Inge Wang at SXSWEdu
Spot usage patterns… and jump on them!
We’re constantly observing usage to spot trends. For example, over specific time periods we can see what content is being taught to what age groups in specific locations through observing similar content being created by different users – we then use this as an excuse to “connect” our users and foster the community spirit by sharing their Kahoots amongst each other (or featuring them).
You can also spot ways in which your product is being used which you never expected – and this can act as positive PR. We noticed many of our users were using Kahoot! to teach e-Safety and digital citizenship. So we contacted those users, and found that teaching these specific subjects is a particular pain point a lot of educators are still trying to solve. Not only could we connect them, we could also leverage this story for positive PR within the teaching community.
Find any excuse to have a conversation
It’s important to show you’re not just a face-less technology; that there are real people with real passions behind it. The personality of your team should shine through and help create a movement.
Make a joke, use Google Translate if need be… speaking to your users can be a highly educating and rewarding experience. Spot patterns and empower the first user in a new community (geographical location, school, subject-matter etc, anything that can trigger a conversation) and encourage them to share and build a community around themselves, for you. Go above and beyond what they may expect, offer assistance, do small favours your system isn’t mature enough to do yet. And remember them, as they won’t forget you. They’ll understand glitches, suggest new ideas, use it in ways you’ve never imagined and tell the world about you.
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