Custom Roles is my approach. You can then filter the User analytics by this. 

We also use the Salesforce integration, which works a bit better for reporting and segmenting by our employees. 

We also make use of Custom Roles.

Our Community Team and Employees have different Ranks, which come with their own rank title, rank icon, and username icon.

• We also guide employees to update their forum signature, as a drawback of the Rank title and icons is that they do not show up in the Product Ideas component.

You can filter by Custom Roles and also create a Segment to report on employees within the out of the box functionality of Gainsight CC.

Internal enablement and education is key for showing employees why its to their benefit to participate in the community. You have to customize it to each function and be ready to give back as you take from them as well. We’ve also done periodic campaigns for spot incentives - you have a range of options from extrinsic rewards like employee spot-bonuses, gift cards, donations to their favorite nonprofit, contests, etc.

We also use custom roles and our support team is actively involved in the community. We recently launched a Question of the Week in our community and it’s been a great way to get our team involved! In August, we ran a photo contest and encouraged users and employees alike to participate (while employees weren’t eligible for prizes). We assembled a panel of employees to help ‘judge’ one of the photo contest winners.

Love this question and the answers!  We also use custom roles, by the way, which can easily be applied in bulk within the User Overview periodically (as an alternative to an automation).  We also have a dedicated rank ladder for our employees and a separate points leaderboard on our homepage.

Like the idea of the dedicated rank ladder and separate leaderboard!

How do you automate the custom roles, or are you manually doing it? 

@KathrynMCarter It is possible to build a technical automation, but considering how easy it is nowadays in the User overview I personally think that doing the following once a week or so is almost as efficient:

1. Go to the User Overview in the control environment.
2. Search for your company’s email address domain (in our case it’s gainsight.com).
3. Add a Filter for Custom role.  You could use ‘Is empty’ or ‘Is not one of’ to select your employee custom role.
4. You can then click Select all (the tickbox) and then Edit custom role to assign your employee custom role as one bulk action (at least for the 25 users listed on that page).

Doing this takes just a few seconds.