I’ve been building out our gamification approach for badges, ranks and points (doing it all in a spreadsheet first before I bring it into our community implementation) and have read all the content on best practices in the KB and various articles. Frankly feeling a bit confused overall about when to use one vs. the other and how the two work together.
But I’ve narrowed it down to this: badges are best to recognize expertise and to support what we want to achieve in the community, while rank is best to reward and stimulate engagement.
With that in mind, I’ve noticed some contradictions in content and wanted to get some input:
- In this thread
@Frank suggests rewarding badges for things like creating topics, answering questions, and in this one it says to hand out to community members when they reach certain levels of activity in the community (and a reply in that thread from@Julian says to break into general engagement and top user badges (e.g. “using a badge for posting your first reply or for starting 3 topics OR “posting 20 replies to a question which have been marked as a correct answer”) while in this article it says to use badges to reward and show expertise and that activities aren’t as meaningful. As such I’m considering leaving out badges that are simply based on thresholds (e.g. posting 3 topics) and instead emphasizing particular actions in specific categories (e.g. posting first topic and 3 replies in a particular category) - I’ve seen a mix of approaches across some of the inSided customers -- with a lot using predicable tiers of badges (e.g. 1, 5, 10. 25, 50 topics) which according to this article should be what we reward with a rank rather than a badge as outlined in this best practices article
Curious what’s the what’s the best practice here -- badges or ranks? Can someone provide some more clarity on one vs. the other?