Celebrating contributors publicly builds their reputation and strengthens community ties, creating bigger long-term incentives than cash or gift cards. Monetary rewards compensate for past work. Public honor elevates their value and generates lasting benefits that outweigh direct financial compensation.
Celebrate your heroes. And I make a distinction between celebration and rewarding them. I was recently in a situation where a community was recognizing people who were helping them out quite a bit. And what they did is they just sort of sent out a gift card. And that was about the past. You're gonna find that cash compensation is usually about what people have done in the past. Like, we'll pay you for the last 2 weeks of wages for your work, that kind of thing. But what you want to do is to celebrate. And celebration is a way of elevating that— those individuals or your partners or your fellow travelers and making them feel very special as a result of having worked with you. But not only that, you want to elevate their reputations so they're able to make more money through their relationship with you. And that creates incentives that will be 10x anything you would have sent them, you know, in terms of like a direct reward. So consider, instead of rewarding them directly, what is your opportunity to celebrate and elevate the relationship?
