Awesome attendees and super engagement were the themes of the night at the first GSummitX meetup in NYC on November 30 at AOL Headquarters. When you put 45 people in a room, most of them strangers to one another, the level of engagement is generally networkish-y, but we got beyond and leveled up with this one. GSummitX is a free local meetup created by the team at GSummit. The goal of the meetup is to continue to strengthen the gamification, engagement & loyalty community on a local level. Keep reading for the full story on GSummitX NYC, and join the Meetup to stay tuned for GSummitX in your city coming early 2012!
GSummitX started off with a gamification talk from Gabe Zichermann and some clever questions from the group. Next, we had Ben Young from Nexercise (a fun and free, fitness app for busy people) take the stage with a demo of his health & wellness app. Health & wellness is such a hot topic of conversation in the gamification, engagement & loyalty space, and Nexercise is right up there with other leaders in the space. Our next presenter was Eve Martinez from the NYC Recycling Department, who filled the role for our “Play for a Cause” portion of the night.
“Play for a Cause” is a new concept we created to give back in a unique way and to foster a more engaging experience at GSummitX. In these sessions, we invite a government agency or non-profit to our events, and ask them present a problem to our group. Afterwards, the group comes up with ideas to resolve that issue by using game mechanics. On November 30, Eve presented the problem of the poor state of recycling in apartments buildings around NYC. People just aren’t doing it as effectively as they could be.
The attendees broke into 3 groups and played a brainstorming-like game with one-another. This is when the room turned into an intimate setting of brilliant minds working together. After about 40 minutes, 150 thoughts on index cards, and a few delicious beverages, six great ideas were born. A bar code scanning game with the bar code on cans/bottles and an apartment building competition for top recycler were two of the six winning ideas. These ideas will hopefully spark some more ideas in the NYC Recycling Department and give them a greater understanding of how gamification can be used to resolve problems they’re facing.
Thanks again to AOL, Gabe Zichermann, Ben Young & Nexercise, Eve Martinez & NYC Recycling, and most of all, to our amazing attendees for making GSummitX such a tremendous success!
Some words from our attendees:
“It’s hard to find a place where business problems are met head on with energetic gamified solutions. GSummitX is where that happens.” –Account Executive at Bunchball
“GSummitX was a fantastic venue to not only learn about gamification but to put what you learn into use. It was fun to contribute ideas for a good cause.” –CEO at Xcela Mobile
