Engaging Voices: Getting Started with Certificates and Badges

Maddie: Welcome everyone to our third episode in our exciting new series, Engaging Voices, and I’m really excited to have this person with us today.

I think he’s gonna share a lot of insight into some exciting new features that Engagez has going on. Again, I’m Maddie. I’m a digital content creator slash marketer and I’ve been working with Engagez for about a year now, and I’m just so impressed with everything they put out there. I’m so excited to chat more with Michael today. Michael, can you introduce yourself for us? 

Michael Doyle: Sure, absolutely. Thanks Maddie. And just so everybody knows, Maddie used to be a client and then we stole her and she’s working with us now, but she has some great experience on the platform. I’m Michael Doyle, and I’m in charge of the customer success here at Engagez and quick background on me I’ve been producing virtual, hybrid events and other online types of programs since about 2000 or so and I had started the Virtual Edge Institute back in 2008, and then created the Digital Event Strategist Certification Training program. Both of those now reside at PCMA they acquired both of those around 2010. So I have a lot of experience in this space.

Maddie: As you guys can see, Michael has been within this virtual space before it was cool back in 2020, and we were all like, oh my goodness. And some people, even before 2020, there’s been kind of ups and downs in the event industry. Michael has written a lot of great pieces about that. We’ll make sure to link that in the text of our of our vlog for anyone who is interested in exploring more insights from Michael. But today I wanna talk to him about some exciting new features that we can utilize with Engagez. Michael, can you chat with us a little bit about certificates and badges?

Michael Doyle: Sure. One of the things that we wanted to do was really increase more of our engagement around hybrid events. And so certificates and badging are a sore spot for event organizers. Whether they’re virtual events or hybrid. Especially with certification that can always be a little bit of a, an area where you know it’s hard to find a good solution for it.

So we’ve actually created both of those and I’ll just go ahead and real quickly show you what those look like and how easy those are to use. I’m gonna go ahead and share my screen over here. And we’re gonna take a look at how you set up some of these features real quick. So in the features area, when you go into your venue, you’re gonna see a couple of new areas down here. One is certificate and the other one is hybrid and physical event support.

Turning on certificate and turning on badging and check in and support. We’ll go through those real quick. And then also there’s a setting. For people, if you’re doing a hybrid event and you have people who are on site and you don’t want them to have the video streaming, but you want them to have all of the other features and engagement opportunities around the tool, then you can go ahead and turn that off and create an access group for on.

And then those people won’t be using up your bandwidth with the video stream. So only the remote audience will get that. So with those turned on, now my admin panel over here, it’s gonna change from certificates to certificates or badges. . And then I’ll just be able to go ahead and jump into that. This is the dashboard for creating either new certificate or a new badge. And we’ll do the certificates first and then we’ll come back to the badges.

So you want to name it and whatever the session name might be is usually a good way to do it. And then over here is where you’re gonna build your certificate. And what you would typically do is upload a background and in this case it’s going to be that certificate that you want to issue to people.

So we’ll go over to our media library and find our certificate and then we’ll go ahead and upload that. It should be right here. So now I’ve got my certificate and I can go ahead and play around with the sizing, make sure it fits and looks good. And then the other thing I might want to do with this is add a signature.

So I’m gonna add another image to this, and I’m going to go ahead and pull up my signature  and insert that. Now that’s going to go here. And then everything else is a variable field. So now it’s all text so you can go into the text area over here, and you can add any of these variables. So could be a session name or a date something like that. So we’ll go ahead and add the date first, and we’ll leave it at that size. We’ll go ahead and create that. Now I have my date up here and you can change the style of the date. That’s in the essentials. But so now I have my date on there. I have my signature on there. And let’s just put the person’s name that we’re going to issue this to. So we’ll do first name and last name and we’ll see how that looks and now I have my name and if I wanna make that bigger, I can just go over and make that bigger and place it where I want. I’ll get rid of this other text box real quick here. And all right, now I have my certificate so I can go ahead and save that. So now I’ve created my certificate and now I can go in and I can generate certificates. 

This would be a new batch and you name your batch and then you’re going to select the certificate that you want. And you can do things like filter by registration date or something like that. And then this is where you’re gonna tell it where that that list is gonna come from. And in this case, it would be via an access group that we’re using.

And I’ll just go ahead and create one here and then you can put your exclusions over here if you have any admin speakers, et cetera. And then you can preview it. And actually I’ll do Maddie.

And now it’s gonna create Maddie’s certificate. Wow. I picked the wrong signature to put in here, but you want a transparent pdf or png.

Maddie: Michael, this certificate, you could attach it to sessions. Yeah. So could you have different certificates for different sessions?

Michael Doyle: Yeah. So you can have as many certificates as you need. So you could have your whole list of certificates here for every individual session that, that you were gonna use. The certificates for. And and so then you would just generate each one of those as its own individual.

Yeah. So you can do it that way and you can you can preview those, edit those and then, if you don’t want to use them, don’t wanna make ’em available, you can go in and delete those.

Maddie: Wow. I can really, just from the aspect that I utilized y’all’s platform for this would’ve been life-changing because certificates are typically the biggest source of headaches for in-person, virtual, you name it, it’s a source of headaches. I know there are a lot of different professions that attend events for the C E U aspect of it, but that certificate and being able to just generate that automatically almost for your participants it can relieve so much stress. I can foresee that. 

Michael Doyle: You can also upload recipients as well, so if you’re running another program, you can also use it for that too. 

Maddie: That’s awesome. So what about badges? How are they different from certificates? 

Michael Doyle: Okay first of all with badges, let’s go ahead and create our badge. I’m gonna generate a badge and we’ll call it a test badge again, and this is where you’re going to pick the size of the physical badge that you’re gonna use. In this case, we’re gonna do four by three and then you can add a background image to it. We’re gonna go ahead and do that. And I think I have one ready to go here. Yeah, I’ll go ahead and insert that and scale it to fit. So now I have my logo on here. Now I can go ahead and start to add different items here. I wanna do again that first name, last name for the badge recipient. And I could do them as separate fields as well. And, maybe make the first name bigger. Sometimes people like to do that. Then I’ll go ahead and make this a little bit bigger here and take out that comma. and now I have my badge. And usually, what I like to do if somebody’s got a long name I’ll just go ahead and drag that all the way over so it’ll accommodate a larger someone with a longer name.

And then the next item I might wanna put on there is my titles for those people. And the position where I want it. And again, I can drag that all the way over here. Someone’s got a long title and make that a little bit bigger. And then I’m gonna put my organization name here and drag that to where I want it and maybe resize this a little bit.

Now the next thing that people would want on here usually is a QR code. So I can go ahead and just generate a QR code and stick it on my badge wherever I want. . And so this now I can go ahead and create the badge. Now that QR code we’ll go back and take a look at it. That QR code is full of all sorts of information, so one you can have, you can use this tool on site.

You can use that QR code to check people in. So if they have their device, then they have an email with that barcode on it. They can come in and and show the barcode. The organizer can scan it, they can check me in, and then they can generate my physical badge. with that. You can also generate badges of badges as well if you want to have badges already printed, ready, for people to pick up. You can do that well as well. So people can just come in, scan, check in, and and they’re ready to go. So the other thing that you can use that QR code for though is so you could use it for lead capture. The exhibitor or sponsors when they check in their QR code if they’re a  staff member at their booth they’ll get permissions via that QR code to scan other people into their booth. There are leads for that particular event. You can also use it for access control if you have, certain sessions or workshops that only people who paid for it get access to, you can use it for that as well. 

Maddie: This, and again, another game changing feature, I think because registration sometimes it, it can make or break your event, right? If you have a registration process that is taking too long because, there’s maybe not enough staff people to check in the amount of people coming or things are getting lost somewhere. This is such an easy way to have things pre-set up and maybe move your line a little bit quicker.

Michael Doyle: Yeah. This is what they look like when they come out and you can play around with the formatting. You just test it out and say, okay, some of these, it looks like the, maybe the name’s too long in some cases, so we can make it a little bit smaller. But yeah it’s really easy to do. And you can also have your tags on, whether it’s a speaker or an exhibitor or attendee all of that can be on there. For access to control as well.

Maddie: I Also am just thinking in terms of, some events that I’ve done in the past. This seems to also provide additional sponsorship opportunities. If you’re looking to have a variety of sponsor packages. , this could be something where you could say, Hey, this sponsor is our badge sponsor, and maybe they could get their own special logo or something on it.

Michael Doyle: Yep. Lots of different opportunities. . And you can also have multiple different badges too. So if you’re doing an event where you have, say, co-located events at the same venue, , you can have separate badges for everybody.

Maddie: That is awesome.

Michael Doyle: I appreciate you taking the time to take a look at it and if anybody wants a demo or wants to try it out on their own they should contact us at Engagez.

Email Michael: [email protected]

Maddie: Absolutely, You can schedule a demo or chat with Michael about your own event strategy and how Engagez features can help you with that. Because we have so much more to offer that can really your event. Engagez saved my life in 2020 and helped me have a truly one-of-a-kind event that no one else had put out that year at least within my space.

And so I think this is really gonna be a game-changing aspect for so many of you guys. 

Michael Doyle: All right thanks again, Maddie Appreciate it. 

Maddie: Thank you, Michael. 

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