What is the simplest and scalable way to reward users for contribution to an online community?
Use digital badges that your software platform provides.
In any community there are always short-term or one-time activities that do not require a dedicated volunteering role. Like helping to facilitate a meetup, speaking at a conference on behalf of the community or participating in a seasonal initiative. At the same time, any such contributions should be rewarded in some way. One of the best ways to do that is to reward volunteers with some special visible site badge dedicated to specific initiatives that make the participating volunteers distinguishable from the rest of the community.
Because it is impossible to plan in advance all initiatives that you will run. It is very important that your platform supports the ability to create custom badges and award them to a group of users based on some criteria.
This is a fragment of a draft of the book “Lessons Learned While Working On Stack Overflow”. Read the full book on kindle or the paperback version.