Sacha Chua, one of IBM's Enterprise 2.0 Evangelist, recently blogged how she used Lotus Connections Communities to award members. Specifically, she wanted a quick way to recognize people's voluntary contributions to community discussions. She took a two step approach.
First, she used Ruby and the Communities API to extract all the members with email addresses and number of posts (along with information on their first line manager).
Next, she created her own Lotus Notes Mail Merge app from Excel to Notes. That way, with a click of a button she can quickly send an email to all those top contributors participating in the community she's moderating. Very nice! Now if we could simplify this process somehow that would be great. 
For all the technical details, you can find more info in Sacha's blog entry.