Setting up, rewarding and revoking manual badges

Is there anyway to add manual badges in mass?

Hi Chris,

yes, this is possible.

If you want to give it up to 50 users at at time, I recommend doing it via the Badge settings page as described above.

If you want to add a Badge manually to many more users (e.g. 500 per month) then you can do this via our api. Of course this would require some developer work on your side.

If the latter is not really an option to you, let us know more about your specific use case. Then we can see if there are other ways to help you with this.

Can we have the manual badge trigger a private message? I don’t see that in the setup …

*Update - I see the private message option now. No idea where it was a minute ago! 

@Kgastaldo 

Where have you found the private message option for manual badges?

I don’t seem to find it 

That is a good question! Unfortunately, this is not very straightforward, due to the fact that we added awarding Badges manually later…

You basically have to save the Badge as an automated Badge, together with the private message you want to send. Once you have set it up, switch it back to a manual Badge. Once you award the Badge to a user, this user will also receive the private message. I just tested it again to be sure.

Julian nailed it. That’s exactly what I do!

Oh wow.

Thank you 

Hey @Julian,

One more question before I ask the developers to assign a bunch of badges via API. 

I have a list of emails to assign the badge (most likely not all of them are registered in the community). How do I (quickly) get their user ID? And also their community username 
Is there an automatic way, rather than manually search the email and get the username?

@Marina Perminova your dev team should be able to get you the list of users based on the list of email addresses you provide them. They would need to use this API call to get the list of user IDs based on their email addresses: https://api2-us-west-2.insided.com/docs/user/#operation/findBy and its the userID which you need for assigning the badge with this API call: https://api2-us-west-2.insided.com/docs/user/#operation/awardBadge

Is the user has a n option to hide the badges by himself? 

Yes, this can be found at the top of your profile settings:

Hey @Julian !

Thanks, for the answer.

In this case, you can show or hide all your badges, the question s if you can select which badge to show and which not? 

Hi @nate2 @Julian we have this question too - can either an admin or an end user select and pin certain badges? 

That would be helpful to spotlight some like certification creds and deprecate some of the more temporal system generated ones.

@nate2 no it is not possible to select individual Badges to show or not to show.

@JKelley I know of a community that is experimenting with this, but I don’t think this is ready just yet. Basically, you can control with custom script how certain Badges are shown (or not).

I will have an eye on the development and share the code with you here once it is ready, then you can customize this for your community as well!

Thanks @Julian 

Yes, thanks @Julian! Another question related to integration with open badges like Credly.  Can Insided badges retain metadata/links or graphic/visual only?

hey @JKelley! so great to meet you and really loved some of your questions on this thread! I was wondering...you mentioned adding badges for certifications. do your certifications expire? we are exploring adding certification completion as a badge, but certifications expire every 1.5 years, so curious to know how other people are approaching certification badges and whether you manually revoke badges, or if there’s another workaround or solution you’ve implemented? 

Thanks in advance! 
-Cass.

My 2 cents as a Community Manager:

The only difference in the flavour of a badge on a user profile on a Community vs a Credly for e.g. is that badges on a user profile on the community denotes the Customer journey IRL for that person and helps primarily in 3 ways:

• Makes the User feel proud
• Help networking: others in the Community to know specifics of the users skills, expertise. See related improvement idea in this direction
• Helps Elevate the Program the badge stands for creating a pull for others

and that is the distinction from a Credly badge on the same person’s linkedIn profile which has to have an element of the Certification validity itself in addition to the Social reward aspect.

Thanks again @JKelley for your thread I reverberate to… on a daily basis

• Open / 3rd-party badging integration and metadata? (Credly)

So in short @Casstastr0phee, I’d think baking in a duration (for the certification usecase) is a good-to-have piece of engg. that I’d not worry about in a Community-context, but automation options around Manual badges, like synced to Group-memberships, Role-permissions based, Points, etc etc… bring-em-on! :)

cc @Sebastian 

Hi @Casstastr0phee nice to meet you - and @anirbandutta you too!

We solved for this - for now - by meeting some of the requirements manually. A lot of it came down to resourcing choices (doesn’t it always?!) since there isn’t an obvious way to automate.

• We did / do manually upload badges for the group of people who have achieved our highest level certification, Commvault Certified Expert, since it’s a more manageable and stable sized group and also they double up with our community Super Users frequently
• In a perfect world we’d also badge / recognize the bigger pool of lower-level certifications, but we don’t consistently have resources who can keep tabs on the list / cross-reference membership / upload
• We don’t worry today about expirations or badge removal, both because it’s not as big as big a priority for our Enablement organization and also, within the realm of community, it helps us more to honor that someone achieved that level (ever) even if they haven’t maintained every current exam. It would be much tougher to manage manually and also potentially cause friction we don’t want to create with our SMEs.

I’m sure there are always better ways of doing things so please keep sharing ideas and what you’re doing! I hope to do more here someday.

@JKelley ditto 🙌

I got another question:

If I made a new automatic badge, i.e. for posting 5 replies in a specific category. Will this badge only be awarded for the future or also for those, who already have 5 replies in that category at the time?