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How to set up Incentives

Incentives are a customizable feature for recognizing proactive employees for reaching company initiatives

Updated this week

This article is best for:

- Global admins

- Connect and Custom customers


To upgrade your account to Connect, go to your billing page and view your subscription plan. Once you've upgraded, you'll be ready to set up your Incentives.

Incentives encourage proactive participation among users, allowing them to advocate for themselves and eliminate the feeling that certain work goes unnoticed. With fixed bonus reasons and amounts, companies can increase recognition for initiatives while streamlining admin work!

You can use Incentives to recognize users for:

  • Attending conferences

  • Completing training

  • Writing content for social media or blog posts

  • Referring new customers

  • Completing wellness initiatives like getting a flu shot or walking 10,000 steps

  • ...and so much more!


Setting up a new Incentives

First, head to Manage Admin Settings>Recognition> Awards, Celebrations & Incentives page by clicking on your profile picture.

Select the “Incentives” header at the top of the page:

Once in Incentives, click on the "Create New" button on the right:

In the Incentive modal that appears, fill in the provided sections:

  • Name: Name of the Incentive.

  • Image: (Optional) Upload an icon or select an emoji of your choosing. 

  • Description: Describe what action needs to be accomplished in order to claim this Incentive.

  • Link text & Link URL (Optional): Include links to any relevant external resources and title the link how you'd like

  • Quantity: Define the maximum amount of times the Incentive can be claimed per month. The quantity will reset monthly for users just like your monthly bonus allowance and is required for auto-approval. Incentives submitted after the quantity limit is reached will roll over to the next month for approval. For auto-approval, once the quantity is reached the award will be "out of stock" until the beginning of the next calendar month.

  • Claim limit per employee: Limit the number of times an employee can claim this Incentive, or leave this field blank to allow as many claims as applicable. If you add a claim limit, a new field will appear in which you can set the claim limit time frame to weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly, or lifetime.

  • Require proof: You can chose to require proof from users when they claim this Incentive. If required, users will be able to add text OR upload an attachment to choose to require proof, either text OR an attachment is required when claiming the Incentive.

Once you have filled out the required information, select "Next" to continue to the Post template:

On the Bonus template page, provide the following information: 

  • Points: The amount each individual Incentive is worth.

  • Message: The explanation of why the user is receiving this reward. 

  • The Incentive bonus preview will show you what the bonus will look like in the Bonusly feed. 

Select Next to move on to select Incentive Audience:

You can choose to limit Incentives to only be able to be claimed by a specific audience. You can also configure the visibility of any post for that Incentive to a specific audience.

To set make the Incentive only available to a specific audience, add a condition. You'll be able to set up specific rules based on criteria like Department, Email, Role, Location, and whether a user has direct reports or not.

You can also choose to narrow the visibility of any recognition posts for the Incentive by updating the Visibility setting. All Incentives will be Publicly visible by default, but you can choose to make the Incentive Private - only visible to the giver and receiver of the Incentive, or, only visible to the Immediate team of the giver, meaning those they share a manager with.

Select Next to move on to select Incentive Approvers:

All Incentives will default to automatically approve but with a quick toggle, you can set any user to approve an award.

If you'd like to include approvers, toggle the automatic button off to gray. Then select the approvers who you'd like to review first in Level 1. When there are multiple approvers in a level, only one person has to review the request in order for it to be approved.

If you decide to add additional approval levels by clicking on the Add Approval Level button, the Level 1 approver(s) must approve the claimable award first, before the Level 2 approver(s) get notified and can approve next.

For example, if there are three levels to a claimable award, Level 1 must approve before Level 2 can approve, and Level 2 must approve before Level 3 can approve. All levels must approve in succession for the Incentive to be awarded. Always make your Incentive Approvers aware of their responsibility, along with what level approver they are, so the employee claiming the award can receive it on time.

Finally, click on the Finish button and that's it! You're all set! Incentives will be immediately ready for users to claim:

Ready to learn more about Incentives? Check out these related articles: 

FAQ

Where do the points from an Incentive bonus come from? 

Incentive points come directly from the company, not an individual user’s allowance balance.

How do I pay for these points?

Just like other allowance points, companies only pay for rewards when they're redeemed, never any unused points. 


Questions? Send us a note to [email protected]; we'd be happy to help!

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