Rewarding participant behavior during workshops with stickers
Published December 30, 2024
In the early days, we might give handful of prizes to participants for good workshop behaviors at the end of workshop. Things like most innovative idea or best participation. Typically, we gave away a few branded swag items and a couple gift cards. One time, a colleague of mine awarded lotto tickets to lucky participants.
We wanted to be generous because these were prizes, yet we had to be frugal because we had a budget to maintain.
But I wanted to reward many more behaviors and reward them throughout the workshop, rather than at the end. Of course, the budget wouldn't let me give away more of the typical prizes and swag, so I had to get creative.
What could we give away that was inexpensive and would still reward good behavior from workshop participants?
We landed on stickers.
They're small, so they can be handed out whenever you see a positive workshop behaviors like good participation, creative ideas, or good questions. When you reward the behavior as it occurs, you reinforce the behavior for that participant and also call out their behavior as a good model for other participants.
And everyone loves getting stickers.
This set includes stickers to reward six behaviors:
Idea Machine for generating a lot of ideas
Kinda sketchy for someone being very visual
Mad why-intist for great questions
Start Nouveau for creativity
Team Player for good collaboration
WIN-novator for innovative ideas
And anyone can get a Design Thinker sticker for any other good behavior.
I’ve used the stickers a handful of times now, and people really do enjoy getting stickers. Plus it gives me a way to say “good job, keep it up” any time someone does something positive without actually saying those words over and over again.
Steal this idea and make your own stickers to hand out in workshops.
During workshops, groupthink works against the divergent thinking you want to facilitate. But there are five approaches that prevent this.