Gather badges allow you to recognize the important people in your community. You can create badges to call out special titles and achievements by using built-in badges, and use the Badges API to create new badge categories.
- Badges are enabled by default in your community and are unique to each brand. You need admin rights to enable badges, (see Enabling Gather badges).
- When badges are enabled, you can (as an admin), create badges (see Creating Gather badges).
- When you've created your badges, you can start awarding them to members of your community, (see Awarding Gather badges).
- Community members can see badges next to their profile picture, (see Viewing your Gather badges).
About badge categories
Not all badges appear and behave the same way. Badges are allocated into categories, which are used to differentiate them, for example, in the Help Center theme and the REST API.
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Titles: represented as a text label next to the user's profile that denotes the role of the user.
An example title might be Community Manager, or Developer.
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Achievements: represented with an icon next to the user's profile that denotes what the user has done.
An example achievement might be for a certification, such as Certified Administrator, or for participating in a beta or early access program, such as Key Tester.
For more ideas in these categories, see Examples of badges for your community.
If you need more badge categories, you can use the Badges API to create them. For example, you might create a custom category for professional certifications, or one for game trophies.
Best practices for planning and creating badges
- Think about what you are trying to achieve with your badges - do you want to encourage people to contribute, to help test, or to reward your most active members? When you know what you want to reward, you can plan your badges around your model.
- Plan the initial set of badges that you think you'll need, rather than creating them one at a time.
That way you can use consistent language and create a consistent set of icons.
- If you are planning to award badges based on milestones, consider the range of badges that you want to create before you start awarding them.
For example, you might want to award a badge when a user has created their first 5 posts, another badge when they've created 20 posts or comments, and so on. When you have your set, you can start awarding the badges based on the criteria.
- Keep the badges simple.
Add a meaningful name and description to each badge so that users know why they are receiving them, and make it obvious what each one means.
- Take the time to create consistent and professional icons for achievements.
Achievement badges sit next to one another in the user profile, so using a specific palette of colors and style is important.
9 comments
Patrick Morgan
@...,
We want employees at our company to be designated as such on any posts they make in our community. Badges seem like the way to do this. Given that this doesn't seem to be an out-of-the-box way of doing this, are there any clever ways for designating people that belong to a specific organization with a Badge?
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Brett Bowser
Hey Patrick,
Badges would need to be manually applied at this time so I'm afraid there's no way to automate this based on the users organization.
I'm not aware of a way to set this up automatically but our Product Managers are aware of this need.
Thanks for bringing this to our attention!
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Patrick Morgan
Thanks @.... FWIW, it'd be great to be able to use the user segments or organizations we've set up in our Zendesk instance!
2
Malakai Hopoate
The "User Badges" option doesn't show within my settings.
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Dave Dyson
Hi Malakai,
Have you enabled them using these instructions? Enabling Gather badges
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Marie-Céline BESNARD
FYI: there is no FR version of this article
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Anna Licciardi
Hi,
Are users notified of obtaining a badge ? (by email for example?)
If yes, this email is it customizable ?
Thanks.
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Kasper Sørensen
Hi Anna Licciardi
Yes, users receive an email notification when they are awarded a badge. The email template can be customized, but not the contents/body of the email.
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Noosh
Hi
I wanted to see if it's possible to automate the process of giving badges to individuals, instead of an Admin assigning the badges manually?
0