Once you are counting who comes back, the next feature writes itself. Points for attending. Tiers with names. A streak, with a number, that breaks if you miss a week.
We are not building it. This is the reasoning, because "it did not feel right" is not a reason anyone can argue with.
What the research suggests
Algesheimer, Dholakia and Herrmann studied what belonging to a brand community does to people (Journal of Marketing, 2005). They found both halves: more participation, and normative pressure that turns into resistance.
That second half is the one a points system manufactures deliberately. Someone who feels obliged to come eventually stops coming. Belonging you can lose by being ill once was never belonging.
We read this at abstract and citation level rather than in full, and we are saying so because a paper you have not read is a weaker thing to lean on than one you have.
What a streak actually measures
A streak measures compliance with a mechanic we invented. It does not measure whether someone wants to be in the room.
Worse, it changes the thing it measures. Once the number exists, some people come for the number. You now have two kinds of attendance in one column and no way to tell them apart — which is a problem for the host, who wanted to know who actually likes it here.
The reward evidence points the same way
The loyalty-programme literature is instructive about who a reward moves. Effects shrink dramatically under self-selection correction (Leenheer and colleagues, 2007) — roughly seven-fold, because the people who join were already the committed ones.
The practical reading: a discount aimed at someone who already comes every week is paying for behaviour you were getting free. If a discount belongs anywhere, it belongs with someone who has not come yet.
What we do instead
A missed week is not punished. There is no streak to break, and nothing resets.
What a host gets is quieter: they can see that someone who used to come every other Tuesday has not been for a month. Then a person decides whether to say something.
That is the whole feature. The value is not in the counting, it is in a human being noticing — and an automated "we miss you" email is the precise opposite of being noticed.
conpeo
- Algesheimer, R., Dholakia, U. M. & Herrmann, A. (2005): The Social Influence of Brand Community. Journal of Marketing 69(3), 19–34.
- Leenheer, J., van Heerde, H. J., Bijmolt, T. H. A. & Smidts, A. (2007): Do loyalty programs really enhance behavioral loyalty? International Journal of Research in Marketing 24(1).