Your learners are already motivated – whether they’re pursuing a degree or a professional goal. But sometimes daily actions like completing paperwork, meeting with an advisor or volunteering requires extra encouragement. We’ve observed that, as learners gain skills and experience, they increasingly value these activities–which builds momentum for them doing more actions, more often. PIPs app users report greater confidence and connection to their community, resulting in better outcomes overall. Learn more about the science behind incentive programs.

PIPs Rewards improves outcomes for colleges, universities, community centers, workforce development agencies, apprenticeship programs and other organizations that help people achieve their educational and career goals and improve their economic mobility and well-being.

We know time and funding is scarce. That’s why we’ve designed PIPs Rewards to require as little work from you as possible, with no IT set-up required. We help design, support, and manage your PIPs Rewards community. If you have questions along the way, our support team is always here for you at [email protected].

The costs of having a PIPs Rewards community are a set-up fee, annual fees based on the number of people in your app community, and the costs of the rewards that your learners earn. We also provide a community of practice for our clients, so you can connect and learn from your peers. If your organization does not have the funds to have a PIPs Rewards community, we will discuss how we can still work with you. We are a nonprofit organization with a commitment to equity and access. We are a nonprofit organization with a commitment to equity and access.

We’ve designed the PIPs Rewards app for ease, enjoyment, and accessibility—and most of the content can be multilingual. Here is a short video walkthrough of the app at this link.

Step One: Let’s talk

We want to learn about your needs and how an incentives program could help. 

Step Two: Uncover the Issue(s) 

We’ll organize a planning meeting so there is a shared understanding of what is the issue you want an incentives program to address, and why it is meaningful and has been hard to resolve

Step Three: Learn from Your Learners

We’d like to meet with a few of your students or clients to find out about their needs and interests so that they can be built into your incentives program. We’ll then create a test community on our app for some of your students or clients to try out and give feedback. 

Step Four: Launch

Working with your organization’s lead, we’ll set up a marketing/ outreach plan with resources so you can get started, provide you with weekly usage reports (which we’ll also show you how to generate on your own), check in with you weekly as you are available, and provide other supports so your incentives program can be a success.

We recommend using PIPs Rewards for a specific stage of a program (for example, college access or retention). You will define a group of people who will be doing similar actions with a goal or milestone they are trying to achieve, which can be broken into multiple steps or repeated actions over a specific time period (often over three to 12 months). If you have a program that involves multiple “stages,” your learners can start in one stage and then be moved into another app community with new actions for the next stage.

We collect data on what actions were taken, by who and when. We also collect the submissions provided by people using the app to validate the actions they take that will earn them points. This data is securely stored. We share this data and information with our partners in adherence to privacy regulations. We also make this data available to our community admin leads through our secure portal. 

We have team members with expertise in research and evaluation who work with our partner organizations on connecting the data we have to the data you use, so we can learn how the incentives program is improving your outcomes and what we are learning. 

People use the app voluntarily, and before they can join they sign our privacy statement.

Who can use the app?

The app can be used by anyone in your learning community that you provide a QR code or link to. We will verify with you who has joined your PIPs Rewards community.

If you have any learners that are younger than 18, they must have permission from a parent or guardian to use this app. 

We strive to have our app be available to a wide range of learners. We can customize content in your community to multiple languages. We also ask for your feedback on how we can make the app more accessible.

We have had more than 40,000 people use the PIPs Rewards app without there being a problem of people falsely claiming they did activities in order to earn PIPs. 

We have limits on all our actions built in to safeguard abuse, and if actions are done more frequently than they should, the person can’t claim the action and will be notified they need to wait to take the action again. So for example, someone can only send in a Weekly Check- In form once a week. In addition, we are able to monitor the activity in your community and can take away PIPs from someone’s account if they were not earned appropriately. 

Before someone can use the PIPs Rewards app, they need to sign our Terms of Use agreement, which includes agreeing to use the platform appropriately. They can lose access to the app if they do not.

We are available to answer any of your questions and invite you to join our learning group along with our other partners and interested organizations.. In this learning group, people share and learn with their peers, and give us feedback on how we can better work with you.

We are excited to be learning with you how to use incentive programs to help people achieve their educational and career goals.

Please contact us with other questions you have at [email protected]. We will respond to you and update our FAQ sheet based on your input.