The Basics of Village in 15 Minutes
Understanding the building blocks of Village, and what you can do with them.
"All great things start with the right incentives."
-A Very Wise Person (who we agree with)
The purpose of this guide is to quickly get you up to speed on the different building blocks you'll encounter within Village, as well as some examples of what you can do with them.
Here you'll learn:
What's under the hood
The building blocks you'll use in Village
Understand what you can do with them:
Examples of incentive programs
Examples of segmentation programs
Watch an optional video walkthrough
This guide is not intended to be a substitute for the more in-depth explanations you'll find throughout the knowledge base.
To get setup on Village for the first time, go to the Admin Quickstart guide ->
To learn about Village by seeing it in action, check out our Guides ->
First up, what's under the hood?
Let's start with a quick theory session on what's actually going on inside Village. You can skip this section for now if you're not in the mood for that.
You can think of Village as two separate components that work together: an Intelligence Engine, and an Execution Ledger.
The Intelligence Engine
The Intelligence Engine securely connects to activities and events that happen on your platform through Village's API or data-integrations. It listens to all these events, and decides what to do when each event happens using rules within Village. You and your team create these rules according to business logic, and Village's intelligence engine will help you along the way through recommendations and ongoing optimization. The goal of the Intelligence Engine is to drive the best action that any given individual in your ecosystem can take at any given moment to meet defined goals.
The Execution Ledger
Our execution layer is built on Village’s powerful ledger. It works to simultaneously evaluate, distribute, and reconcile complicated value flows. While the Intelligence Engine is constantly making evaluations based on data and events coming from your platform, the Execution Ledger is automatically and instantaneously performing output operations such as securely distributing incentives into users' wallets, sending comms, and segmenting users. The best part about the execution layer is that every actions it takes is fully able to be scrutinized by your team.
Understanding the building blocks
Whatever you do in Village, you'll be using the following building blocks.
1: What Rules do
Village is built on a system of logic called Rules. Everything that happens in Village is a result of a Rule being executed. The basic components of a Rule are (1) its trigger, (2) its conditions, and (3) its output operation. Triggers could be some event happening on your platform, or a defined scheduled time, and the output might be to award your users when that event happens, with a promotion, loyalty points, or many other award types. Rules can also do other things, like segment users and send comms.
2: How Rules are triggered
All Rules are evaluated when a Rule ‘trigger’ occurs. Depending on what you want to achieve, there are a few different ways to trigger a Rule.
3: Different types of Awards
One outcome of a Rule executing is some type of value, what is called an ‘Award’ in Village, being distributed to a user. Awards can be simple one-off transfers of value, eg. a $5 bonus, or form part of much more complicated programs involving many different Rules. How an Award is configured determines how it is communicated and experienced by the end-user of your platform.
Monetary Awards
Non-Monetary Fungible Awards
Within Village, we distinguish between fungible awards, eg. awards like $1 or 1 point that are identical and interchangeable with each other, and unique or non-fungible awards, like a badge, a discount code, or gift card that are uniquely identifiable.
Before configuration, non-monetary awards are called 'Units' in Village; effectively a blank store of value. Depending on how they are configured, you can create the use cases below and others.
Non-Monetary Unique Awards
4: How to apply conditions to rules
Before a Rule can successfully issue an Award or place a user in a Segment, it first needs to be evaluated and the conditions of the Rule satisfied. Conditions are the business logic you want to be met before executing a Rule.
5: Specifying who the recipient is
There may be multiple users involved in an activity on your platform, so each Rule requires a recipient for the Award, communication, or segmentation. For example, John (User 1) might buy something from Jane (User 2), who was referred to your platform by Ralf (User 3). You may want to issue Awards and send comms to all three of those users in different ways, without creating multiple events.
Putting the building blocks together
To see use cases in action, and get more inspiration on what you can build, check out our Guides->
1: Incentive programs
The flexibility of Village’s Rules, and their underlying Triggers, Conditions, Award, and Segment logic, means you’re able to create and automate a variety of powerful incentive structures to meet your business needs. We’ve outlined a few common structures below.
Goal Structure Examples
Referral Structure Examples
Bonus Pool Structures
A badge, status, or ‘funded unit’ are all able to be linked to a funding pool. When this happens, these Awards will automatically pay users an amount of the funding pool on a defined date proportionate to the total amount of linked awards they have accumulated.
Loyalty Programs
Subscriptions & Stored Value
2: Segmentation programs
Read our User Segmentation Playbook to see segmentation in action->
Segments allow you to group similar users using Rules logic. These Rules are triggered based on activities or events on your platform. Segments are therefore a powerful way to group like individuals or track user journeys in order to deliver more personalized incentives or comms. While Segments are very flexible, some common use cases are below.
Congrats! 🎉 You should have a high level understanding of how Village works, and what you can do with it.
Next up, we recommend:
Watching the video walkthrough below to familiarize yourself with Village
Reading through some of our Guides that walk through examples of rule creation in action->
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