Leaderboard Management (107)

Gamification is a great way to drive utilization, create excitement and motivate! The Leaderboard is where all of this comes together.

What's interesting is that gamification is not a new concept, even though it sounds like it evolved out of the video game era of the 1980’s. Even the Boy Scouts weren’t the first ones to use the concept of earning badges and ranks. It’s been around, and stays around, because it works!

From the feeling of earning an achievement, to having the anxiety of FOMO, gamification is a great tool for driving people to do activities we want them to do, to better themselves; especially in the education and training space.

In this article we’ll cover how to access the Leaderboard, how to manage Achievements, and what areas of the platform it will affect. Then at the bottom of this article, we have some templates and best practices to help you get started on setting up gamification for your Private Labeled VT System with achievement icons and everything.

What is a Leaderboard?

The Leaderboard will allow you to create achievements for your Users to earn, awarding them different rewards like points, badges and rankings. Each user’s progress is tracked and displayed on a Leaderboard on the Main Menu.

A User can rise up on the Leaderboard by gaining rewards for completing different achievements that you control, the types of rewards are:

1. Points – which can be achieved by pretty much any activity within your System (Signing in, completing Certifications, completing a Chapter, etc.)
2. Ranks – which can be achieved by meeting a specific goal such as completing a set of Courses or even earning a certain number of points. Ranks can also be awarded based on which Content role the user has. You can also manually increase someone’s rank based on an offline achievement.
3. Badges – which are earned by similar goals to Points and Ranks, such as logging in 100 times in a week, or completing a specific list of content. (Badges will be coming in the Next Phase)

Getting Started – Enabling your Leaderboard

To initially access and activate the Leaderboard, navigate to the Super User Dashboard and select 107 – Leaderboard Management.

From there, click on “+ New Leaderboard” and fill out the required fields.

• Draft Mode – You can start your Leaderboard in “Draft Mode” so you can build out achievements before your Users can see it. Simply keep draft mode enabled and choose which access levels you want to see it. Once you create Achievements, you will see data begin to accumulate – and once you disable draft mode, that data will be reset.
• Display Name – If you’d like to call this something other than a “Leaderboard” you can do so here.
• Internal Display Name – If you plan on creating multiple Leaderboards, give this a friendly “internal” name so that you can easily reference it later.
• Display for All Locations? You can use one Leaderboard for ALL of your Locations – or you can select specific Locations to create one for. Or you can create an individual Leaderboard for each of your Locations.
• Achievement Types – Select which achievement types you’d like enabled. All three achievement types can be renamed to better suit your brand – so we give you the option for a singular and plural version. (Example, instead of “Points” maybe you call them “Shrute Bucks” – so you would enter “Schrute Buck” [singular] and “Schrute Bucks” [plural])
• Leaderboard Overview – This field will allow you to “explain” how your Users can earn points, badges or ranks – if you feel the need to detail out “Every time you sign in, you gain 5 points” – then you can do that here. The Overview will be displayed on the main Leaderboard page. Note: If you leave this blank, it simply will not show up.

Need something quick to get started? Copy the code below and paste it in the Overview section. Be sure to select the “HTML” icon before pasting.

<div class="container">
	<div class="row justify-content-center">
		<div class="w-75">
			<img src="https://lsvt-courseware.s3.amazonaws.com/leaderboard/assets/Leaderboard-Overview-Header.gif" alt="Train. Earn. Engage! The All New Leaderboard." class="img-fluid" />
		</div>
	</div>
	<div class="row my-4 text-center">
		<div class="col flex-column">
			<h2 class="mb-0 text-primary">Train. Earn. Engage!</h2>
			<p class="mt-1">Soar to the top of the Leaderboard as you build and strengthen new skills.</p>
		</div>
	</div>
	<div class="row justify-content-between mx-4">
		<div class="col-md flex-column text-center px-3">
			<img class="w-25 img-fluid img-thumnail" src="https://lsvt-courseware.s3.amazonaws.com/leaderboard/assets/01-leaderboard-overview.png" alt=""/>
			<p>Sign in, complete assignments and interact with your peers.</p>
		</div>
		<div class="col-md flex-column text-center px-3">
			<img class="w-25 img-fluid img-thumnail" src="https://lsvt-courseware.s3.amazonaws.com/leaderboard/assets/02-leaderboard-overview.png" alt=""/>
			<p>Earn Points, collect Badges and climb the Ranks.</p>
		</div>
		<div class="col-md flex-column text-center px-3">
			<img class="w-25 img-fluid img-thumnail" src="https://lsvt-courseware.s3.amazonaws.com/leaderboard/assets/03-leaderboard-overview.png" alt=""/>
			<p>Stay engaged and watch as you soar to the top!</p>
		</div>
	</div>
	<div class="row justify-content-center my-4">
		<a class="btn btn-lg btn-secondary" href="/profile/achievements.cfm">View Your Achievements</a>
	</div>
</div>

• User Settings – Select if you would like Users to appear on the Leaderboard using their First and Last Name or by their Display Name. The Display Name is created by the User and can be something anonymous. Example: John Smith versus JDogg22

Note: Once an Achievement type is enabled, you’ll be able to configure how your users can earn these achievements (and in the case of Points, how many they can earn. That is covered in the next section below.)

The Different Achievement Types

Points

The Points achievement type will allow you to reward your Users with points for completing different activities in your System. You can use our default image, or select your own. The image is displayed next to the User’s points on the Leaderboard, like this (in Blue):

Points can also be manually added or removed by using the 202 – Manage All Users tool. (More information on that below.)

Ranks

The Ranking achievement type will allow your users to earn different ranks by completing different activities in or outside of your System – or even by earning enough points if that is enabled as well.

Rank images are customized per Achievement as you create them. The default image is displayed within the Admin area and will only be used on the Leaderboard if you have not provided a customized image for a specific Rank/Achievement.

Badges

The Badges achievement type will allow your users to earn customized badges that you’ve created. These can be earned by completing activities in the System – or awarded manually.

Badge images are customized per Achievement as you create them. The default image will display on the Leaderboard to indicate how many badges a user has been awarded.

Badges (And Ranks) will also alert the user the next time they sign in that they’ve earned a Badge – it features the name of the Badge/Rank and the Description:

Achievements

To create a new Achievement, select the “+ New Achievement” button at the top right. From there, depending on what you enabled in the previous step, you can select a new Achievement to create.

1. Points

Enter a Display name and Description – for Points this is visible to you as the Admin internally only.

• Enable Achievement – This will simply turn it on or off. Any points received in the past will NOT be revoked, disabling it will simply not allow users to earn the achievement in the future.
• Points Earned or Deducted – Enter how many points this achievement will be worth
• Award (or Deduct) Points – This section is where we’ll define an action that Users must complete to earn or deduct points, as well as how many times they can earn this particular achievement.

After selecting an action, select how many times a user must complete this action in order to earn the achievement.

Next, you can select how often a user can complete this action – either unlimited times, daily, weekly, or monthly.

And finally, you can set an overall cap on how many times a user can earn points for the action.

Example, if you select “Complete any chapter” as your action, then put “5” for how many times it must be done, then, you can set how often the action can be completed to daily. Finally, you cap the achievement at 3 times.

So with that setup, a user can watch up to 15 chapters per day to earn the achievement – any more than that and it will not count.

Note: One quick note on how “Weekly” achievements are earned. When “How Often is this Action Completed” is set to “Weekly” – a User has to complete “X” Chapters per week to receive the points.
When a User signs in, we check “today” minus one week – to see if they completed the Chapter or not.
For example: If I sign in on 9/20, we check to see if the User completed the Chapter between 9/14 and 9/20.
If the User did complete the Chapter, they receive the achievement.
Continuing with this example – if you sign in the next day, 9/21, we dates move up 1 week to check between 9/15 and 9/21. We would still see that you completed the Chapter on 9/20, and because it’s still within the 1 week period, we don’t make any updates.
So once 1 week has passed, let’s say the User signs in and completes the Chapter on 9/28, we would see the Chapter as being completed in a new week, and the User would receive the Achievement again.
Long story short – the weekly time period to earn the Achievement begins the day the user first earns the Achievement, and continues from that point on.

• Enable All Content Roles – If this is set to NO, then you can choose specifically which content roles this achievement will be available to.

2. Rankings

Enter a Display name and Description – this will be displayed to all Users when they select the icon under their Achievement page.

• Enable Achievement – This will simply turn it on or off. If you disable it, anyone who earned the Rank will no longer be at this rank and will move to the next closest rank.
• Priority – There may be several Ranks that Users can achieve on your Leaderboard. Users can only have 1 Rank at a time - similar to real world ranks like the Army. In this field, you will set what priority/order this ranking achievement represents (1 is the highest) - so for example, complete newbie Rank might be a 5, while the grand master top dog Rank would be 1.
• Rank Image – Select an image to represent this Achievement – this will be displayed to all Users on their Achievements page. We recommend using a 250px X 250px image, saved as a transparent PNG.

Note : this is a required field, all Rank achievements require an image.

• Congratulations Message – Provide a celebratory message when the Achievement is awarded. This will be displayed in a pop-up message when the User has earned the Achievement.
• Requirements – This section is where we’ll define how users can earn this Rank.

• Award Additional Points – When a User receives this Badge, you can (optionally) choose to award them with points (if the Points achievement type is active)

3. Badges

Enter a Display name and Description – This section will allow your users to view how to earn the badge. (This information can be found under your Profile, under the “Achievements” tab)

• Enable Achievement – This will simply turn it on or off. Any points received in the past will NOT be revoked, disabling it will simply not allow users to earn the achievement in the future.
• Badge Image – Select an image to represent this Achievement – this will be displayed to all Users on their Achievements page. We recommend using a 250px X 250px image, saved as a transparent PNG.
• Congratulations Message – Provide a celebratory message when the Achievement is awarded. This will be displayed in a pop-up message when the User has earned the Achievement.
• Requirements – This section is where we’ll define how users can earn this Badge.

• Enable All Content Roles – If this is set to NO, then you can choose specifically which content roles this achievement will be available to.

Note : If a user earns a badge/points and then you later disable it, they will still retain the points they earned from achieving the badge.

Action Completed: When you select Multiple Courses as the Action to be completed, we will display all of the Courses that need to be completed under the “Achievements” tab on the main Leaderboard view.

202 – Manage All Users – Achievements

When editing a user, you can now select a tab called Achievements. In this section, you can view a log of all achievements the user has earned and when they earned them. You can also manually add or subtract points from the user.

As a Super User B, you can also access this page directly by hovering over the “Points” number on the Leaderboard and clicking the ‘Pencil’ icon:

Any points there are manually added or subtracted will automatically be added to the “Comments” section for the user to keep a log:

Best Practices / Suggested Starting Achievements

To help give you some ideas and how to get started, below you’ll find our suggestions for new achievements to create. This should give you a good launching point to get creative and create your own achievements – and get your users moving up the leaderboard!

Points:

IMAGE	NAME / CRITERIA	POINTS	NOTES
	Signing In Sign In (maximum to earn of 10 points per day)	10
	Complete any Chapter Complete any Chapter (Max to earn of 25 point per day)	25	Every time a user completes a Chapter.
	Complete any Course Complete any Course (Max of 50 pts per day)	50	Every time a user completes a Course.
	No Sign In Penalty Lose 10 points if no Sign Ins within 7 days	-10
	No Training Penalty Lose 25 points if no content taken within 15 days	-25

Badges:

IMAGE	NAME / CRITERIA	POINTS	NOTES
	Member Just being a member	100	We give everyone a “member” Badge and 100 points just for being a member.
	The Basics Completing the “Basics” course	500	This is an example course name, but this could be any course of your choice.
	10k Club Awarded once a user earns 10k points	500	An extra 1000 bonus points for getting 10k points however they can.
	Good Samaritan This is manually awarded by the Super User	1000	Given to someone who went out of their way to help someone else.
	The Extra Mile This is manually awarded by the Super User	500	Given to someone who went above and beyond.
	The Master Completing all of the Courses	500	When a user completes an entire series of courses, or a certain Certification.

Ranks

IMAGE	NAME / CRITERIA	POINTS	NOTES
	1 Star Just being a member	0	Everyone that Signs Up is a “1-Star” Rank
	2 Star Finishes the “Basics” course	0
	3 Star Earns the “Master” Badge.	0