Take The Guesswork Out Of Administering E-Certificates After Your Upcoming Webinars
As you plan your live webinars, you take pride in getting every detail just right.
You’ve chosen an engaging webinar topic, amped up your digital marketing campaign, and even incorporated feedback from previous virtual events to really make your webinar shine.
But how can you ensure that your event offers engagement and value to your target audience? One way to do this is to provide a personalized certificate of completion.
Many webinar organizers avoid administering certificates because they underestimate just how powerful and influential they can be. Additionally, event planners may feel overwhelmed by the planning process and are apprehensive about adding an additional task to their workflow.
However, offering certificates can be incredibly lucrative and isn’t as hard as you may think. Let’s look at why you should offer an eCertificate at the conclusion of your webinars, how to design one, and how to send them to attendees once your virtual event concludes.
Why Offer A Certificate Of Participation To Attendees
You’ve invested a lot of time, energy, and resources into hosting the best virtual event possible. That’s because even a free webinar series can have a significant impact on your brand’s bottom line.
To make a positive impact, you must offer participants tangible results to make the best impression possible. It also should be a feature you can include in your marketing materials as you promote your webinar.
A certificate that proves they attended the webinar and learned about a specific topic is an excellent takeaway for attendees that adds value to their experience and encourages them to attend another of your organization's webinars.
There are several benefits to offering an attendance certificate to your attendees.
-
It gives them credentials to add to their resume or professional portfolio.
-
They can submit the attendance for professional development points or CE credits.
-
Attendees can submit the certificate of attendance for reimbursement.
-
Participants can share their achievements on social media.
Additionally, your organization will benefit from offering these certificates. Each time an attendee shares a certificate from one of your webinars, it’s like a boost for your online marketing strategy. This simple action generates leads and attracts new potential customers to your events.
A certificate signals that your company has the knowledge and expertise to educate your audience about that topic. It could also inspire your attendees to look to your organization as a leader in the industry. Issuing certificates also boosts the credibility of your organization, especially if they are well-designed and look professional.
Let’s look at how you can create the perfect certificate to send out when your webinar ends!
Photo by Andrea Piacquadio
Tips For Creating A High-Quality e-Certificate
If you’ve never created certificates before, it can seem like a daunting task.
Not only does each one need to look professionally designed, but you must customize them with the name of each attendee. So it’s crucial to create a design that looks great and is easy to personalize.
Here are some tips for creating a fantastic certificate for your webinar.
ENJOYING THIS BLOG? CHECK OUT OUR EXPLAINER VIDEO ON YOUTUBE!
Use Certificate Templates To Speed Up The Design Process
If you already have a vision for your webinar’s certificate, you can create your own certificate templates from the ground up on your favorite graphic design software.
You could also choose free certificate templates to cut the design process down and free up time for other tasks. When designing your webinar’s certificate, you must include essential information, such as:
-
Webinar Title
-
Subject Covered
-
Attendee Name
-
Date Of Issue
-
Certificate ID
-
Allotted Credit Hours
You can also upload backgrounds, images, or a brand logo to ensure everyone knows which company hosted the webinar. The goal is to create a clean and uncluttered document, so make intelligent design choices to ensure your webinar certificate looks professional.
Opt For Branded Color Schemes And Designs
The certificate will represent your organization as well as your event. Your attendees will share these certificates on their social media accounts, such as Facebook or LinkedIn, and upload them to their digital portfolios. You want to ensure the viewer will know where they got them.
Opt for colors that fit into the branding used within the virtual event. These colors should reflect your organization and be cohesive with other materials you’ve designed for the webinar.
Create A List Of Webinar Participants
To properly generate your certificates, you’ll need a file that contains a list of every participant who attended the webinar.
Your virtual event platform should be able to generate this list in a format that’s easy to translate to your certificates.
Don’t forget to obtain a list of participant email addresses as well so you can send the digital certificates once they are generated.
Once generated, spot-check your list to ensure that the data is correct. You don’t want to send the wrong address to the wrong participant, so taking extra time to ensure your list is accurate is time well spent.
Partner With Your Virtual Event Platform
One perk of choosing the right virtual event platform is that they can take over administrative tasks to ease your workload.
Platforms like BeaconLive offer certificate delivery. They can add a webinar certificate to any virtual meeting through a simple API.
If you stream your event via Zoom, Teams, WebEx, or another platform, BeaconLive can certify the attendees and provide you with a list of participants. They can even help ensure your webinar is accredited by the right organizations, meaning your CE certificate will give your attendees maximum value.
Now that you know how to create your certificates let’s look at how you can generate and send them to your webinar attendees.
How To Send Webinar Certificates To Participants
No matter what type of webinar you’re hosting, you’ll want to send the attendance certificates out in a timely manner.
Once you have your e-certificate ready and a verified list of attendees, all that’s left to do is send the certificates. This is the easiest part, so here are some steps you can take to streamline the already simple process.
1. Partner With A Certificate App Or Service
While you could manually create certificates for each participant, a free webinar could have hundreds of participants, meaning it will take days to generate a certificate for each attendee.
If you are hosting a webinar through a platform that doesn’t offer certificate services, like Zoom, the best thing to do is identify an app or tool that helps you quickly and efficiently send out certificates.
You can try:
-
BeaconLive: This service offers an in-house team of experts who can add an API to any webinar to generate attendance certificates.
-
Certifier: This tool allows you to create and send certificates via email.
-
Gutenberg Certs: This Zoom App plug-in helps you send secure certificates.
These applications and services make it easier to administer certificates in a timely manner, encouraging participants to brag about their accomplishments and promote your organization at the same time.
They connect to your third-party app to identify certificate recipients and verify their attendance to ensure the right people receive the document.
2. Export And Upload Your Attendance List
You’ve already prepared your list of attendees, so now you have to upload the list into your certificate app.
Typically, you’ll use a CSV file to ensure the names load correctly into the template. Double-check to confirm that the names of the attendees in the certificate template match the names of the columns in your CSV file so that the names are uploaded correctly.
You’ll also need to include the recipients' email addresses to ensure they receive the correct certificate.
Once you’ve uploaded the attendance list to your certificate template, you can download them as PDF files to keep for your records. This is helpful just in case a participant loses their certificate and needs a new one issued at a later date.
3. Schedule A Mass Email To DELIVER Your Webinar Certificates
Finally, you’re ready to send your participants the webinar certificates of attendance. If you’ve chosen the manual route, you’ll need to attach and send each certificate individually. This will take a lot of precious time from your work day.
If you’ve chosen to use a service or app, you can automate the process. Once you’ve uploaded the CSV file to your e-Certificate template, you can click publish and send it on the app you’ve chosen for your certificate.
The program will send an automatic email to each participant with a PDF copy of their certificate attached. It’s that easy!
Partner With BeaconLive For All Your Webinar Needs
When planning a continuing education webinar series, you have a lot on your plate.
You need a company that can expertly handle your CE workflows so that you can focus on crafting an engaging, successful webinar.
BeaconLive will eliminate hours of administrative tasks from your workflow by producing, managing, and delivering continuing education webinars, certificates, and even compliance.
Contact us today for more information on how we can help send webinar certificates that will attract more of your target audience to your CE virtual events.