​​Highlight contributions & expertise with manually awarded badges (& win a 100€ voucher!) 🚀

Special thanks to all our beta testers who provided their feedback - you all really helped us improve the feature! @Ditte, @bjoern_schulze, @Jurgen, @Drew C., @lila_meyer & @David T-Mobile! 🤩

As the pioneers of this feature, it would be great if  you guys can already share your opinion of it (& details about how you plan to use it, so you can get a headstart on the challenge  ).

The use case we’re looking most forwards to utilizing, is highlighting users that write great content, with a special, one off badge, and a call out in a weekly update to the community.

“This week/month’s winner of the (most liked post) is (username) with (xx) likes on (this post), explaining/clarifying/sharing details around (something).” 

That way users get a unique badge that nobody else has.

We’re thinking of rolling it out to Most likes, Most helpful post, Best technical explanation, and Most engaging topic, during a specific time period. Potentially starting monthly and rolling it out to weekly or fortnightly as we see fit.

Mind you we’ve not started yet, however this is part of our incentive strategy for 2020, and we’re excited to finally being able to give customers something unique, that is special to them, and them alone. 

We’re initially planning on implementing the following manual badges:

Alumni - We have a power user program in our community and every single user who has ever been a part of this program will get an Alumni badge. This way we show appreciation to everyone who has ever been a power user and who has contributed with their activity and input to the success of the community.

Ten Year Club - As our community approaches its 10th anniversary, we’ll be starting to give out manual badges to users who reach their personal 10th anniversary in the community and are still active until today (or still have been active within the past few months).

Community Author - As we are pushing User Generated Content by offering users to test hardware and write reviews, as well as offering them to post turorials or personal articles regarding “mobile lifestyle”, we will be rewarding each user who contributes with a Community Author badge, showing apprecation to their engagement in widening the community’s range from a service oriented to a more social and dialogue driven community.

I also think we will steal @Ditte’s concept regarding a special badge for extraordinary content. ;)  

In the long run we want to find even more use cases for badges. Our ideas mostly revolve around automatic goals and rewards, but we also have ideas for other manual badges that just need a little more detailed preparation (e.g. participation badges for events or beta tests).

Another idea for badges is the ‘cheeky outage’ badge. While we can’t add a timebound badge (User online between (date/time) and (date/time)) we can manually award badges to users active in an outage topic.

For instance Badge for “Survived the great (service) outage of 30th February 2025” It’s really cheeky, but it’s fun 😃 (Yes, I know that’s not a real date anymore…)

Here are my utilitarian uses: 

Certified User - We offer certification on our products via our learning center. I’ll be awarding members who have passed the courses and exam with a certification badge. 

Conference Speakers - When we have a customer or partner who speaks at our conference, or on our behalf at another conference, I’d give them a speaker badge. 

Conference Attendees - I’d like to give our World Conference attendees a badge. 

And my fun ones!

Our gamification is around Heroes. We’re planning to award “Hero of the Quarter” and “Hero of the Year” to one hero per quarter/year. I’m thinking the Hero of the Quarter badge will move from one user to the next - but former hotq or hoty will get an alumni/former hotq badge. 

I also like the idea of doing superlatives once a year - Most Helpful, Most Likely to Answer, Rookie of the Year, etc. 

Lots of good ideas above, including some I hope to borrow in the coming year!

@Kgastaldo already shared the use cases that I had in mind, but to quickly summarize…

Certified Admins - we have a certification program for Gainsight Admins, and I manually awarded a badge to all those Community members who are certified.

Conference Speakers - I was thinking of doing this too for our Pulse conference speakers, until I realized most of these people are probably not on our Community today, and we don’t have much content today that would likely engage them. (our Community is most heavily utilized by the Gainsight Admins today)

As for feedback on the functionality, I would really appreciate the ability to upload a file of members, and/or the ability to search for them by name and select them. It’s very tedious to have to lookup their member usernames in another screen, and then come back and paste them into the badge page. 

Thanks for the feedback Lila - for the public release we added the ability to search for users by name and select them on the ‘award badge to users’ page 🙂 - hope that makes things a little less tedious!

Preach on the upload file! If I could get a master email list of people who did something (IE attended our conference or got certified) and could upload the whole thing, that’d be ideal. It would just award the badge to people who are there and skip over those that are not (based on email). 

I want to give the inSpired community some insights about the Alumni badge.

We’ve successfully launched and awarded this badge to about 50 users of our community, while also using the message function within the badge to send a PM to each of them. The PM basically said: “Today we want to thank and acknowledge you for your contribution to the success of our community ...”. Most of recipients had been super users years ago and haven’t been active on the community for years.

We’ve gotten responses from about 30% of the recipients, all within 72 hours, each of them thanking us for this recognition, often even apologizing for being inactive for so long. Their response gave us an opening to get a new dialogue going with them.

One single user reacted negatively, due to the fact that he just had to leave our super user program involuntarily (and in general having a “ special character”). It wasn’t enough for him to be able to hide badges in his profile so I removed the badge again.

All in all we’re very happy about the outcome. A 30% conversion rate, combined with such a positive feedback, doesn’t happen often. And we are optimistic to be able to convert some of them to active users again.

As an inSider I’ll exclude myself from the competition but wanted to share my use case here anyway 😉.

@Ditte and @bjoern_schulze went the extra mile and helped us test this new manually award badges feature in clickable prototype format, which really helped us understand where we had made false assumptions (where they’d expect to find this functionality, how they’d expect it to work). 

As a reward they’ve earned the new ‘UX Tester’ badge on inSpired! 🙂. On the product team we love to make sure we’ve nailed our designs so we always appreciate it when you guys take time out of your busy day to help us improve the product.

congrats Bjoern & Ditte, and thanks for everyone who shared use cases and voted on others! :)

Hey all,

I am very happy to announce that we have some winners for our challenge. :)

1. @Ditte for the idea of Badges for top-performing contributers of a week
2. @bjoern_schulze for his idea of using Badges for all active & inactive power users
3. @Kgastaldo for the idea of announcing “Hero of the quarter/year”-users

As the second and third place have received the same amount of likes for their contributions, we will give both the same reward for the second place of course. :)

You will receive your very own, exclusive Badge as well as your reward after the holidays. Thanks a lot again for all users who submitted their ideas here!

Woohoo! Just in time for the holidays. Thanks for the fun money - and also the functionality!

Whoop Whoop!