Using Gamification to increase the Engagement of an Education-Tech Platform

The company

CareerFairy is a Swiss scaleup that offers a platform where companies can connect with students to inspire them on job opportunities. The company works with premium brand like Deloitte, L'Oreal and BMW and attracts hundreds of thousands of students from all over Europe.

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The problem

Since many students have their only experience with the platform via the events organised by the brands, many users don't know that there is a whole set of features beyond the streaming of live events.

So CareerFairy had the ambition to build a whole experience to support students in the last year of their studies and land the job of their dreams. That's when they have contacted us.

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How we've helped CareerFairy

The first thing to do was to help CareerFairy define their goal. Working togethet with the CTO and the product team, we have defined the gaol as to increase the engagement of the platform and the overall sense of purpose that their solution offers.

It was clear from the start that to be successful we couldn't just add a few more features or some badges and leaderboard. We needed to build something that students would truly care about. But how to do it?

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Understanding users and their world

The first thing we've done is qualitative research into the world of our users. We've talked to around 20 of them to understand their current experience with the platform and also their main problems during the last year of university.

What we have understood is that for a lot of them the value of a solution like CareerFairy went far beyond the live-streaming event. It was about connecting with potential future employers and understanding their values. It was about answering the question "if this will be my life in a year from now, will I be ready for it?".

Once we understood this, it became clear that to increase users' engagement, we needed to build fetures to help students answer this question.

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Adding value and a journey

We started adding new features tho provide the value that users were looking for. We added, for example, the chance to ask questions before the event and then we made the poll of questions visible also after the event was expired. This was something that we learned was very valuable to users.

We have introduced an onboarding that could help users personalise their first impact with the platform. That's because we learned that it was off-putting for new users to register and land on a page offering generic event suggestions and then having to scroll to find relevant ones.

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Only then we have created mechanisms to increase engagement and extract even more value.

We have added avatars and introduced "profile completion": the more we could know from users, the more personalisation we could offer. So we needed to educate users on the fact that some data was needed in order to provide peronalisation.

Note that we haven't only added new features or only added a personalisation journey, but both at the same time. This way, the promise of more relevance was also the way to nudge users to share more about themselves and engage more with the platform.

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Increasing referral with gamification

Lastly, we have added the chance for users to invite new users and unlock rewards. The power of what we had discovered meant that we simply needed to offer more of these features to incentivise perticipation. We needed no external incentive.

So we introduced polls and surveys during the live events.

This worked like a charm! Users had an incentive to spread the word not to win a prize or money, but to be able to have their particular question answered during the event. And also, many were helping simply because they wanted other people to benefit from the platform.

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The result

The result has been to extend the usage of the platform for many users. Whereas before our collaboration, the majority of users were using CareerFairy for just 1 to 2 events, after the average lifetime was around 6 months.

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“Thanks to Sparkr we know our own strength and weaknesses better, we understand where we need to improve and how we can help our users even more in the future.”

Max Voss - Cofounder and COO at CareerFairy

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