Housecup Slack and Discord Bot
Introducing gamification to improve community culture
Project overview
Quick Facts
Servers Created
3,727
Users Onboarded
219K+
Platform
Slack & Discord
The challenge
IntInternal pain points in growing teams, such as a lack of cross-departmental interaction, missed recognition for small victories, and declining morale, needed a creative, engaging solution to improve team culture.
The solution
We developed the HouseCup bot, a gamification tool inspired by the Harry Potter™ House system, allowing users to award points to peers for good work, thereby encouraging positive engagement and celebrating achievements in real-time.
The results
After internal testing and public release, the bot achieved rapid adoption, being implemented on over 3,700 servers and successfully onboarding over 219,000 users, validating the theory that gamification encourages better community culture.
1
Project background
Purpose
Celebrating Small Victories
The HouseCup is a Slack and Discord bot that utilizes Harry Potter™-style houses to award points to fellow team members to celebrate the small victories and acknowledge good work. Our theory was that introducing gamification encourages more engagement between members, and people appreciate being validated for good work and are inspired to continue. After implementing the Slack bot internally, we discovered the results were true, and we wanted to share the bot with others for free.
2
Improving our work environment first
The Problem
Improving Team Culture
Our team, like many others, has both in-office and remote co-workers. This new normal comes with certain pain points:
As a team grows, new members may not interact with others that are not in their department or have a reason to do so.- It's easy for chat channels to be filled with the day-to-day operations of work that small victories get missed.
- Team members can begin to feel low morale or under-appreciated.
Start of the Bot
Building Blocks of a Product
Developing the bot provided several benefits to our team, including a chance to experiment and learn a new technology (Slack and Discord integration), confirming the potential for positive impact on other teams, and offering a fun internal initiative.
3
Building the slack bot
Defining the Spec
The Tech-Stack
With the concept of assigning houses, awarding points, and earning the eventual house cup of the year, we had the basis of a fun project. We built a simple reply bot, prioritizing stability and scalability for servers that could have thousands of users. Key systems we built included:
Onboarding process to offer tutorial messages on install to help onboard users into their houses.- User permissions for staff members to be able to create houses and assign users to them.
- Create user groups and add in users (with custom titles and descriptions).
- Register houses with flexible options for assigning titles and descriptions (not limited to Harry Potter houses).
- Dashboard experience for admins to manage user groups, users, and permissions.
- Leaderboard that tracks which users have the most points and which house is currently winning.
- Easily award or remove points by messaging the bot.
Quick look at what we did
4
Building the discord bot
Next Up, Discord Bot
Two Community Spaces
Slack is popular in professional industries, but Discord focuses more on personal and gaming communities. We wanted to prioritize launching a Discord bot as well. Since the underlying code bases are very similar, it was an easy transition to build a custom Discord bot using the logic already in place for Slack.
5
Getting the bot ready to release
The Visuals
Building Blocks of a Brand
Once the name HouseCup was formalized, the brand team designed the logo and aesthetic. With roots in the Harry Potter world, we created a brand style that was playful, handmade in nature, and still a nod to the original houses, using imagery from abstracted landscapes and house crests.
Website
To Highlight the Product
We designed and built an accompanying website to detail the product's functionality with documentation and support. We spent the most time on animating the illustrated hero on the first load, which was built entirely with CSS.
Quick look at what we did
6
Sharing with the community and the results
Our Goals
For a Positive Impact
Our hope was to share the positive impact we had on our own team with others. Friendly competitiveness and showing appreciation can go a long way in building a better culture. After being released, we saw a number of large communities use the bot for their own teams.
Satisfaction Survey
For the Initial Release
Short of two years, we looked back at the bot's growth and conducted a survey to receive feedback on user satisfaction and positive impact. The results below provide a brief snapshot of the initial growth:
servers created
users onboarded
messages shared
Project Background