How to Encourage Participation in a Shared Storyworld

8 steps to building a shared storyworld from the perspective of motivating someone to contribute to your world:

1. Inspire – first and foremost you need to capture attention and seek to ignite in the participant a deep routed creative urge to be a part of something amazing
2. Reassure - with many competing projects and opportunities, participants need to be reassured that their contribution will count. That is, that “something is going to happen”; that the project has momentum or endorsement or credibility or all of these otherwise many may feel their contribution could be a waste of time
3. Inform - tell the participate how she can contribute and describe the processes for submitting work and having it accepted. The process needs to be fair and transparent as this will help reassure.
4. Entice - tease collaboration from participants by offering a spectrum of ways in which they can contribute to the storyworld. Don’t just ask for “stories” or “illustrations”, also ask for small specific focused contributions. These are easier to complete and are more likely to be in canon.
5. Recognize - thank everyone for their participation whether it meets your quality threshold or not
6. Rally - be supportive of the community and ensure that comments from community members are constructive and not hurtful or spiteful
7. Reward - find a way to reward participation in addition to any commercial arrangement you may have agreed
8. Educate - if you find that participation is high but the required quality isn’t, consider ways to improve the ability of your contributors by recommending further reading or courses or even holding your own seminars or online discussions and courses.

Read more at Transmedia Storyteller