Do badges (gamification) produce positive results in a professional community?

Question

The community manager of a large developer community recently mentioned to me that we now have the ability to roll out badges for achievements on the site. These sound similar to Stack Exchange's badges (SE is not the platform); users would gain badges for positive contributions, ranging from a "nice post" badge for a single post that's well-received to badges that recognize good contributions over time. There is not currently a reputation system; the badges would be the only visible gamification, though user profiles link to all their contributions so you can get a sense of how active they've been.

I've heard some people in other professional communities dismiss badges or "achievements" as "gold stars, like in kindergarten", arguing that it's not very professional. I've heard others argue that badges help user engagement and keep people around and active longer. I'm aware of this list of research papers about Stack Exchange/Stack Overflow, on which I found this paper about badges, which talks about badges and reputation. I don't know enough statistics to be able to tease out the badge-only effects from what they report there. And, of course, it may be just plain hard to measure the effects of one reward in a multi-reward system like SE.

How can we evaluate the option of badges, without a scoring system like reputation, for our own community, other than trying it and seeing what happens? Is there any research, or maybe case studies, that could help us predict the effects of introducing badges to our community?

Answer 1

It depends.

Do you think that it is necessary? What is the age of your community? Is your community focused on answering question or hunting achievements then? These are question which you have to answer.

You have to consider that getting badges can result in spam and unprofessional answers. The age of your community is considerable too. Although you can't make a point for all, you can think about it. Is it a young community? Maybe it's useless then since younger participants have a liking to showing off. If they are older, will they even care about it?

Badges are nice but they are just objects. Objects given by a system. I don't think that they are special in any way. I wouldn't ever consider getting badges. Instead of that I try to get something awesome, something really unique. Somewhen I found a really good solution:

Instead of giving them badges, give them something they can alter. I've seen a lot of forums where you could gain an specific subtitle, prefix, or suffix if you've participated a lot. At 1000 posts you even have the opportunity to name yourself as whatever you like, e.g. "The Awesominator", "Big Pizza" and so on. It simply shows off how important the users are. Badges are nothing special, everyone can have them, but your unique subtitle, prefix or suffix is personal to you!

Also, it's considerable to get achievements, or badges, by the administrator personally. You can trick a system so you're getting way too many badges, but you can't trick a person (that easy). It's always a honor to be rewarded by a staff member, trust me. This will really push your users, however it's a lot of work.

Instead of badges you could also introduce user levels. I'm really sure that you have a post counter or something else, so why not extend it to user levels? The higher the level, the better the user. To prevent users spamming around in your forum, the points will be summed up by different factors, e.g. (online-)activity, post counter, rated threads and posts.

In the end, it really depends on your community. Actually, you can run every forum without any kind of gamification. It's not necessary, it's just helpful. You should consider it really carefully, because showing off, spamming, and unprofessional answers will help nobody!

Answer 2

Introducing achievements can have mixed effects and as said by one of the previous answers, the type of community you have and what goals you have will determine whether it's best to implement an achievement system.

If you're looking for better engagement of your members within the site itself, then achievements are a good way of doing so. While they could be considered like "gold stars", ultimately as humans we enjoy being rewarded and so we do whatever we can to get them. Much on the same basis as to how sites like this work. Stack Exchange rely on this basic human desire to make sure that questions are answered with relevant content etc.

You could experiment with the concept and ask a few of your colleagues what their thoughts are. Ultimately though, an achievement system is a means to an end but is not an end in itself. For example, if you want to only implement such a system to just attract more users, it's likely not going to be successful. However if you implement the system in order to drive activity on your site so that they then help to achieve an end goal then it might be worth doing.

The community site that I participate in has just implemented an achievements system and we've done so in order to increase general discussion within our forums and to encourage users to spend more time on our site looking at other things (such as our news output etc). We didn't launch it though just because we had the capability to do so etc.

Answer 3

I've found that badges or achievements can produce spam or unnecessary posts that end up clogging the forum. While yes, it can drive your post count, I don't believe it really creates engagement or a positive community experience. I would be careful if you choose to go forward.