Badges are a simple, powerful way to recognize, reward, and gamify your community. Whether it’s for power users, helpful contributors, or affiliate members, badges help your best people stand out — across posts, comments, and DMs.

Want a full breakdown of how Access Groups work? Check out our Access Groups Overview →

How Badges Work in Heartbeat

Badges are powered by Access Groups — which act like member segments or smart lists. Once you’ve created an access group, you can toggle on the badge visibility setting. This adds the badge next to the member's name across the community.

Step-by-Step: Create a Badge

1. Go to Settings → Access Groups

2. Click Create Group

3. Name your badge group (e.g. “Power Users” or “Cool Kids”)

4. Choose a badge color
   (Custom colors allowed)

5. Decide how members are added:

   • Automated (e.g. # of posts, comments, logins, event attendance)

   • Joinable (members can opt in/out)

   • Admin-controlled (you choose who gets in)

6. Toggle on Badge under Visibility

7. Click Create

Use automated badges to reward high engagement and admin-controlled badges for exclusive recognitions.

Badge Ideas & Use Cases

• Power User Badge – Automatically awarded based on activity

• Helpful Badge – Given for high comment + reaction volume

• Course Complete Badge – Add with a Workflow after completing a course milestone

• Affiliate Badge – Recognize referral contributors

• Community Champion Badge – Fully admin-controlled reward

These update every 24 hours, so new badges are distributed automatically as members qualify.

Gamification Tip: Badges are a great way to gamify your community, introduce achievement mechanics, and public recognition.

See It in Action: The Hearth

We use badges extensively in The Hearth, our customer community for over 3,000 builders.
You'll see Heartbeat Expert badges, affiliate badges, and more — all created using access groups.

💬 Want to join The Hearth? Click here to get in →

Let us know if you want help designing badge strategies or automating recognition in your community — we’re happy to brainstorm with you. Reach us at support@heartbeat.chat.

Heartbeat will display the 2 most recent badges received by the member next to their name. All other badges will appear in their profile. We are working to give more flexibility around which badges a member wants displayed if they have more than 2.