the 3FO gold star board: building a custom employee recognition system

At 3FO, we've always believed in recognizing and celebrating our team members who exemplify our core values. For years, we had a basic gold star board website for internal purposes that served its purpose, but it was pretty barebones. It really was just a simple way to give shoutouts without any real tracking or analytics. It didn't capture the specific data we wanted to see, like which values were being recognized most often, individual point totals, or the ability to include images and GIFs to make recognition more personal and engaging. I’ve taken it upon myself to almost gamify the experience and revamp it from the ground up inspired by our new site build that launched just over a month ago.

What We Built

The Gold Star Board allows team members to give "gold stars" to colleagues who demonstrate our five core values: Driven, Sincere, Committed, Fearless, and People-Centric. Each gold star is worth 5 points, and employees can give up to 3 gold stars per month to encourage thoughtful, meaningful recognition rather than casual participation. The system includes features like personalized messages, optional image uploads, and a scoring system that tracks progress toward 100-point milestones. It was particularly exciting to create because this was my first solo site build from the ground up that didn’t depend on a tool like Wix or Squarespace.

What makes this solution particularly effective is how it's tailored to our specific workflow. We built in safeguards to prevent self-nominations, monthly limits to encourage quality over quantity, and an admin dashboard that gives leadership visibility into team recognition patterns. The system even includes a fun "90's mode" toggle that transforms the interface with nostalgic styling. If you’re asking me to build a site with full creative control, this is just bound to happen. (sorry.)

Why Custom Development Made Sense

While there are plenty of employee recognition platforms on the market, building our own gave us complete control over the user experience, data ownership, and feature set. We could design the interface to match our brand, implement our exact scoring methodology, and integrate seamlessly with our existing WordPress infrastructure. The result is a tool that feels native to our company culture rather than like we're using someone else's system.

This project exemplifies how custom development can solve business problems that off-the-shelf solutions can't address. Sometimes the best solution isn't the most complex one. Instead, it's the one that perfectly fits your specific needs, your team's workflow, and your company's culture. For 3FO, that meant building something uniquely ours.