Ideas for Recognizing Forecasters - Incentives

Engaging your forecasting community is key to driving participation and high-quality insights. Recognizing top contributors with well-designed incentives motivates individuals and strengthens the culture around forecasting. Use this list of ideas for identifying and rewarding your outstanding forecasters.

Identifying Your Top Forecasters

While accuracy is a primary metric, there are several ways to identify and celebrate valuable contributions. Use the platform’s leaderboards and activity metrics to spotlight different types of excellence:

• Accuracy-Based Recognition
• • Overall Leaderboard: Highlight users who rank highest for consistent forecasting accuracy across the site.
  • Challenge Leaderboards: Recognize top performers within specific challenges/topics.
  • Single Question Performance: Celebrate those who provide the most accurate predictions on individual, high-impact questions.
    
• Engagement and Contribution Recognition
• • Most Upvotes: Acknowledge forecasters whose contributions receive the most peer upvotes, signaling valuable insights.
  • Most Comments: Recognize those who actively participate in discussions and enrich the forecasting dialogue.
  • Most Forecasts Made: Reward users who consistently engage by submitting the highest number of forecasts.
  • Best Question Submissions: Spotlight participants who propose high-quality, thought-provoking forecasting questions that stimulate engagement.

Incentive Ideas

Although many people assume that hard incentives are the most effective motivator, our experience shows that the best results come from tapping into self-motivation and intrinsic rewards. Recognition, a sense of achievement, and the opportunity for development are often some of the strongest drivers of engagement and satisfaction among forecasters.

• Public Recognition
• • Shout-Outs and Mentions: Feature top forecasters in internal communications, newsletters, or team meetings.
  • Leaderboard Spotlights: Regularly update and share leaderboards in visible channels.
• Tangible Incentives
• • Gift Cards: Award digital or physical gift cards for top performance.
  • Company Swag: Distribute branded items such as mugs, t-shirts, or notebooks.
  • Professional Development: Offer access to relevant online courses, certifications, or industry events.
  • Flexible Perks: Provide extra time off, flexible work hours, or remote work privileges.
  • Charitable Donations: Allow winners to direct a donation to a charity of their choice.
• Experiential Incentives
• • Lunch with Leadership: Arrange informal meetings or lunches with senior leaders for top contributors.
  • Presenting Insights: Invite recognized forecasters to present crowd forecasts to leadership or at company events.
• Platform-Based Recognition
• • Badges: Use built-in badge templates like “Monthly Top Forecaster,” “Monthly Forecasts Made,” and “Monthly Commenter.” Once you create the badge, the platform will automatically assign these badges each month to those who earned it. 
  • Custom Badges: Create unique badges with custom imagery for achievements such as “Best Rationale”. Custom badges need to be assigned manually by an Admin. 
  • Challenges: Create a "Challenge" for a distinct group of forecasting questions that is time-bound. Typically, a challenge might last a few weeks to several months, with all questions and scoring limited to the challenge timeframe. When a challenge ends, the site's challenge leaderboard can be used to celebrate top performers and distribute incentives. Some examples: 
  • • "Quarterly Business Outlook Challenge" where participants forecast key business metrics (e.g., sales, revenue, customer growth, or market share) for the upcoming quarter.
    • "Product Launch Success Challenge" where forecasters predict outcomes related to a new product or feature roll-out (e.g., Will the new feature reach 1,00 active users within four weeks of launch? What will the customer satisfaction score be one month after launch?)
      

For a holistic look at engagement, see: Strategic Tactics for Engaging Participants

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