Why Badge?

• Badges recognise accomplishments and achievements that cannot be formally accredited, where experience outside of qualifications is highly valued and often not well documented.
• No achievement is too small to be badged! Any accomplishment, however small, can be the start of a journey to a better future.
• Badges provide the ultimate tool for providing verified employer references in an emerging freelance workforce.
• Badges give earners the power and language to better tell their stories by clearly displaying the activities they have engaged with and transferrable skills gained along the way, in language that employers understand.
• Badges support earners to use the experiences, skills, and competencies they have developedby working with your organisation to take positive steps in their own lives.

Reporting & Outcome Tracking

• Every organisation has outcomes or markers that can be hard to measure and track. Badges give a quantifiable source of data for ‘soft outcomes’ such as increasing skills or wellbeing.
• The analytics tool on Credly makes reporting on your organisation’s badges and activities extremely easy.

Managing Staff & Internal Processes

• Earners don’t just have to be participants on programmes or customers of your activity! Rewarding staff achievements with digital badges makes a great record of upskilling and progression within your organisation.
• Badges are a brilliant way to reflect staff training, CPD courses and suitability for roles.

Recruitment

• Recruiting the right people for any organisation requires a lot of time, care and effort. Badges are fantastic for getting a snapshot of a person’s experience and skills.
• Badges have the added bonus of showing which organisations have previously worked with candidates in many capacities, without the laborious requests for references.

Grants & Funding

• Lots of organisations will utilise grants and funding at some point. Incorporating digital badges as a measure of impact can make applications stand out, increasing the credibility of how you will be tracking, measuring, and reporting on specific outcomes, as well as bringing structure to your activity.

Attitudes & Movement Making

• Every organisation has key messages and attitudes they want to develop in others. Digital badges are a brilliant way to recognise and encourage the change you want to see in the world.

Marketing

• You can get really creative with using badges as a marketing tool!
• Badges are designed with your logo and branding, so are very personal to your organisation. Every time someone shares a badge they earned with you, it’s an advert.
• Because of the way badges are displayed in browser, people that click on your badges get a direct snapshot of the activities you deliver and the impact you’re creating, and can be linked directly to your website or social media channels.

Creative and cultural organisations are the jewels in any community crown, providing colour and flavour to the landscape of our society. Those involved in the arts are supremely confident of the value the activity it has in the world, but how do we mark this in a lasting and meaningful way?

Badges give arts and cultural organisations the perfect tool for recognising and celebrating creativity and the contributions individuals make to the creative and cultural landscape.

• They fit well alongside the existing tools arts orgs have at their disposal to recognise and celebrate participation (e.g. Arts Award, Artsmark).
• Using the Badge Nation model, they are inexpensive for organisations to access and work for tiny grassroots cultural orgs as well as large established National Portfolio Organisations.
• They allow arts and cultural organisations to motivate and recognise individuals for participating or volunteering in their programmes.
• They act as a great marketing tool for arts and cultural activities.
• They allow the sector to clearly demonstrate the value they bring to individuals.
• They are a great way of providing employer references to an emerging freelance workforce.

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The community and voluntary sector house an extraordinary range of grassroots community groups, social enterprises, charities, and community businesses. In a myriad of different ways, they support  communities to grow, heal, support each other, and often find ways of making things a little better, more kind, and more fun. From grassroots sport to places of worship, community centres and youth centres, badging allows these organisations to recognise the individuals they work with.

• Badging with Badge Nation is accessible to any organisation who wants to use them (we never let the membership fee be a barrier).

• Badges allow individuals to use the experiences, skills and competencies they have developed by working with your organisation to take positive steps in their own lives.

• Badges allow organisations to recognise the huge contribution individuals make.

• Badges can motivate and celebrate participation in all its myriad of forms.

• Badges are a fantastic way to demonstrate your social impact.

• Badges make a great marketing tool to get your organisation out there.

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Given all the challenges for businesses during 2020 and 2021, it is always so heartening to see the desire employers have to encourage new talent and provide great opportunities for prospective employees. From providing exceptional work experience opportunities to demonstrating the added value your placement/internship or apprenticeship has, digital badges could quickly become the reason people choose to work for you.

• Badges are the perfect way to reward and incentivise great behaviours for your trainees and early career workers, as well as recognising the skills and commitment of your long-term employees.

• Badges provide the ultimate tool for providing digital verified employer references.

• Badges are a great measure of your social value activity.

• Badges carry your brand and can help to spread the word about the values you hold as a business.

• Badges become a really useful tool in recruitment processes.

Finding ways to support individuals with barriers to employment is frontline work. Right now, during the deepest economic downturn in recent history, it matters more than ever. The organisations right across the country who do this vital, difficult, and hugely rewarding work are different, and range from huge housing associations to grassroots charities, premiership football clubs and everything in between. We have some awesome members of the nation who fit into this group and who are using badges to recognise the individuals they work with.

• Digital badges are a powerful tool when used by employment support providers to help individuals take steps to better futures.
• They can be used to support individuals to tell the story of their learning and experience.
• They give individuals confidence to tell people what they are good at, and what they have accomplished.
• No achievement is too small to be badged! Any accomplishment, however small, can be the start of a journey to a better future.
• Badges can be joined together to create pathways of activity that lead to opportunities within specific businesses or sectors.
• Badges don’t require earners to jump through hoops or fill in complicated paperwork.
• Badges can recognise accomplishments and achievements that cannot be formally accredited.

Local authorities are the institutions responsible for more support for any given area than any other single organisation and have some of the greatest power to influence and affect change. Not only do councils deliver services to people, but they also commission them. Digital badges work brilliantly for organisations as well as for individuals – preferred providers, ambassadors, volunteers and champions are all really easy to recognise with badges.

Beyond the multitude of badging options that exist within local authorities, there is also the benefit that exists from giving your commissioned providers the ability to issue badges. By writing badges into tenders and commissions they become a really useful tool for recording impact and soft outcomes. Providing Badge Nation membership to organisations you commission is a great way to help them, help others

• Individuals as well as organisations can be issued badges.

• Badges are data rich and are a great measure of soft outcomes and social value.

• Badges can be used for volunteering, ambassadors, and champions for their contribution to good causes

• Using badges in supply chains and procurement processes can incentivise and reward sustainability.

• Badges can be used to support specific skills and employment pathway agendas.

Schools are amazing multi- faceted organisations. Too often, the performance of a school is boiled down to the results it produces in final exams, but what about all those amazing extra-curricular activities that don’t have an exam or a qualification? What about all those skills that young people develop in band, on the games field, or looking after the school’s animals? What about careers programmes or residential trips? Digital badges mean that you need never print another certificate for extra-curricular activity again (although they can be printed as certificates too!)

• Badges are great for rewarding skills as well as knowledge.

• Badges can be used to reward any extra-curricular activity from peer mentoring through social action to animal care and team activity.

• Badges can be used to reinforce your careers activities for students and provide evidence of Gatsby Benchmarks being met, or as an evaluation and reporting tool.
• Badges can be used for student awards schemes and ambassador programmes.
• Badges carry the detail of the activity and – unlike certificates – give student the gift of the language of their achievements.
• Not just for students, badges can recognise the achievements and commitment of incredible teachers and staff!

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Everyone knows that that formal qualifications and certificates have a value in a skills economy, but how much do they really tell us about a person’s suitability for a role? Or the actual experience of gaining that qualification? What is it that makes a course amazing for someone? Is it the curriculum itself or all the additional value that the organisation can bring to that setting?

Badges are an amazing way to demonstrate the ‘over and above’ achievements of learners at your establishment. They can show the valued skills they will have demonstrated as well as the actual qualifications or certificates they have achieved. Work experience, traineeships, industry placements and internships, T-levels, Skills for HE and more are all amazing places to use badges!

• Badges can be used to recognise the skills that formal qualifications don’t.

• Badges can be used to highlight work experience and vocational in and out of your setting.

• Badges can be used to support transition to FE or HE.

• Badges can show contribution to student life, community engagement or social action.