How Does Membership Work?
Here we break down what is involved in joining Badge Nation, and the journey to writing and issuing your very own digital badges.
We find the best way to start your badging journey is to get stuck in with a Badge Writing workshop – we run free workshops regularly, with no obligation to join Badge Nation if it isn’t for you.
During this workshop you will learn about the ingredients that make up a badge, the Cities of Learning Badge Standard, and how to best reflect your organisation’s activity. You will leave the workshop with the makings of your first badge, you might even finish writing it!
This is also a good time to consider what badges you would like to write and how implementing a digital badge offer might work in your organisation. You can download our Badge Planning document for free to support you with this.
Don’t forget to consider how personal data works when issuing digital badges via Credly. Read our ‘Earner Personal Data and Consent to Issue Badges Via Credly’ document.
When you are ready to join, your organisation will complete a Membership Agreement. This agreement will explain the terms of your membership, asking for some details about your organisation and the people who will be responsible for issuing your badges.
This agreement is an online form which, once complete, will provide you with information on next steps and an invitation to join our Members Area.
Complete your Membership Agreement
Once you have joined you can access the Members Area – our resource hub with all sorts of helpful documents and links to make your membership really easy. Help to write and issue badges, how-to videos, promotional materials to use when sharing your badging journey with your networks, you’ll find it all here.
You may have already made a start on your first badge but if you haven’t, now is the time.
Using what you’ve learned in the workshop and supported by information in the Members Area, write a badge by completing a template containing details such as title, earning criteria, skills, and links to your activity. You can find a link to provide us this required information in the Members Area.
Once you have submitted your badge in ‘final draft’ we will start the Quality Assurance process. The Badge Nation team will QA each new submission, checking for general spelling, readability and conventions, proper use of skills tags, and mapping to the Cities of Learning Badging Standard. We will also check if your badge passes ‘The Stranger Test’ – whether it is easily understood by someone that is unfamiliar with your organisation or the activities described in your badge.
We may get in touch with you at this stage to discuss any suggested modifications or required clarifications as part of your personalised support.
When everything is good to go, we will publish the badge to Credly – the badge issuing platform – live and available for you to issue to your earners.
If this is your first badge, this is also when we will add your organisation and individuals that have been specified as Collection Managers as per your Membership Agreement, granting them access to Credly and allowing them to issue badges and access analytics.
It’s over to you!
When we add your specified people as Collection Managers, they will receive an invitation from Credly.com with further instructions.
Credly is the platform where you will be uploading your earner information for them to be notified that they have been issued with a badge. To get going, we provide a short Collection Manager Training video to help you navigate the platform and take you through the issuing process step-by-step. We recommend familiarising yourself with this before you have a go at issuing badges to your earners.
Once you have successfully issued your badges, Credly will send an email notification to earners with some simple instructions on how to create an account and claim their badge.
This is a great chance to engage with your earners and provide support around their badges, such as sharing these how-to videos for claiming their first badge and adding their badges to LinkedIn – we have email templates ready for you to use in the Members Area.