Achievement badges: sharing ideas for best use on our sites

[Holly Dilatush]

Kyryl suggested I start a new post.  This link should take you to the discussion where I asked:

I hope other site creators will share brainstorming ideas of how we might use these badges... what are you assigning them to? 

• point total milestones?
• contest winners?
• voted most helpful?
• most improved? / showing strong improvement?

Kyryl wrote:

"Personally, I think achievements are a pretty cool thing. I've been the member of one site in the past which has been using the sort of badges (they called them "medals") which could have been earn for lost of the activities on the site. The main idea of them was that they were just funny badges on the profile of the member, and sometimes a bit offensive but the members of the site haven't been thinking about them in such way, well most of them.

As usual, they have been given manually by the administration for the certain deeds of the members. So let's imagine you have created the post related to the sheep, and after that, you could receive the medal called "herdsman" that's been created especially for you and because of the post you have made. This approach made me think that my medals are pretty unique and not easy to earn.

That's the experience I had with the badges/achievements etc.

By the way, Holly, I think this question deserves to be the separate discussion :-) I'll tell you more, it would be even featured, at least I think it's a pretty good thing to discuss and to hear the opinion of the other NCs.

Best wishes,"

- - -

I'm still struggling with understanding how to set them up properly, but will continue to play with them as I find time.

Meanwhile, I'm considering one badge for all members (in full color) and then others that will show in gray tones until/unless activated/earned.  I appreciated this tip! 

Other badges I'm considering = 

Diamond member (not sure how to establish criteria that could be 'automated' or easy for me to calculate; I used this on 2.0 and it was a popular badge to earn)

Contest winners (Periodically our prior site offered contests = they were a lot of work for me, but greatly appreciated by members)

Members of the Month (We used to use Members of the Week, but one week was not long enough, and our site is still small and growing, so Member of the Month would be easier to implement, once I get how it works = can I assign a badge for one month only for one member only and then remove it and assign it to someone else?).  

Member Milestones (still pondering this one)

I would love to hear YOUR ideas, too.

Have fun with these new tools, everyone!

~ Holly

[Marco Westerhof]

Hi Holly, we offer workshop-series to our members and we used to provide paper certificates after completion. Now with this new feature we have started to assign special badges per workshop to their profiles. It saves us time and money, it makes the member profiles more interesting to view, it retains members on our network, and it drives some competition too. 

[Holly Dilatush]

Thanks, Marco.

The only challenge I see with this is that the badges wouldn't be transferable (to LinkedIn, to a resume, for example).

The micro-credential craze appears to be growing along with the requests for transferable credentials.

However, I've thought of using a Ning badge for completion of a pronunciation course, for example (on the site I manage).

Thanks for sharing,

Holly

[Marco Westerhof]

You're welcome, Holly.

And yes, I certainly agree - there are quite some developments in this respect. With these and many other ongoing technical developments out there, I think we as customers have to trust Ning to continuously evolve and keep in pace, and provide us with the best and most flexible solutions to manage our networks. That, after all, is why our business is running primarily on SaaS-services.

[Gerard Nealy]

I'm sad now. This is only for 2.0. When are the cool things coming to 3.0?

[Holly Dilatush]

I don't see that anyone has replied to your post, Gerard?

But this IS 3.0 that I'm writing about.

https://creators.ning.com/announcements-from-ning/north-pole-expres...

[⚡JFarrow⌁]

Will we eventually be able to upload our own badge images?

[Kyryl_Ning_Support]

Hi there!

Yes, that option also would be available it's simply hidden right now, we have to check how the system works on the high load first. As adding of the lots of custom achievement's pictures and badges could increase the load slightly.

And it's a bit easier to fix something when you have small number of places to check :-)

Thanks for understanding and best wishes.

Ning Team.

[⚡JFarrow⌁]

Any new developments on this?  It would be nice to upload out own badges and assign them as an admin

Also... you know what else would be cool is a Flag emoticon which shows country or state..

Is there a development team I can speak with?

[Bizz]

Justin I have not really used this feature but I took a look and notice ther is a hidden form for uploading images but don't think it's live yet. Just wondering if there may be a way to add some images to your file manager then using a bit off code could swap out the ning image with one of your own, or use the text option but use a keyword for some code so that if it see that word it will replace the text with the corresponding image.

hmm will have to have a play around with that and see what can come up with.

[Marco Westerhof]

I would be very interested in an update too !