Open Forum

Hello, all! Kicking off our next edition of Tip of the Week, we're focusing on event/session credits and certificates. We saw a discussion in the Open Forum recently regarding certificates, and it made us think about how virtual events have likely expanded many organization's educational offerings. For Cvent, as an example, we offered CMP credits in-person at Cvent CONNECT every year. With our programs virtual this year, we adapted and continue to offer many credit opportunities (check out Cvent Academy training here).

Therefore, let's walk through the features and configuration you can use in your Flex event to manage your credit and certificate programs.

• Configure Credits in your event:
  • First, credits must be enabled in your account and in your event through Event Configuration.
  • If you have not used credits before, set up your account-level offerings through Admin > Events > Event Credit Types. This will then populate as an option at the event-level.
  • Now, within the event itself, you can choose to apply credits for the overall event (through General > Event Settings > Credits), or you can apply them at the session-level. Or even both!
    • Whichever route you opt for based on your organization's offerings, be sure to note how the credits are awarded.
      • We'd recommend one of the two options to make it as efficient as possible for you and your team:
        • Automatically award credits to: Participants / Award credits: Immediately (when registrants are marked as participants).
        • Automatically award credits to: Anyone who completes the general event/session feedback survey.
          • These options ensure credits are only being awarded to those who truly attended and even engaged with your event. They also are automatic which will save you manual efforts.

• Create Certificate:
  • If you haven't set up a certificate in the past before, do note that you access these in the same place you build your badges – Onsite > Badges & Certificates.
  • When creating your certificate, set the stock size to Portrait or Landscape so it can be built and downloaded in a standard certificate format.
  • If this certificate is being created for certain registration types, associate that here, as well.
  • When designing the certificate, we always recommend enabling the Grid settings so you have a better sense of the alignment and spacing.
  • The look and feel is of course up to you, but be sure to use the components and data tags to your benefit.
    • If you'd like to include a logo, use the image component. If everyone is seeing the same general text and only their names are different, use the text component to write out the verbiage.
    • Considering having different text or images depending on an action in the event? Use Conditional Text or Images.
      • The most common example I've seen through certificates is custom text depending on the session they are marked as a participant for.
      • Once you drop the conditional text component on the designer canvas, a prompt will appear where you can enter the text, select "Is marked as a participant for the following session" and select session. You can then repeat this for multiple sessions if needed.
    • Use data tags such as First Name, Full Name or Company.
      • To populate the attendance or credit details, use Sessions Attended, Credit Transcript, or Overall Credits.
      • Don't forget to use Dynamic Resizing with data tags – this will save you formatting/spacing issues if someone has an extra long name.
  • One simple step we always recommend is previewing the certificate once you've saved your updates. Under the Actions dropdown, select Preview to download a sample. This will help you perfect the design even before sending out to your stakeholders or attendees.

• Send Certificate to Attendees:
  • Alright, you've done the heavy lifting. So, how do your attendees officially receive this certificate and view their credits?
  • The most straight-forward way would be to include it as a downloadable data tag in your thank you/post-event email.
  • However, to encourage feedback and ensure only true attendees are receiving it, we'd recommend creating a custom email and setting the audience to "Attendees who have completed all their feedback surveys."
    • The process would then be: Event completes > Feedback survey is available (through the Attendee Hub or through an email) > Attendee completes survey > Attendee receives automatic triggered email including their certificate.

Questions for You:

• If you already have your credits/certificates set up in your Flex event, how are you managing the process? 

As always, share your tips, experiences, and questions below! #CventTip

#Flex-Creating/ManagingEvents
#ManagingVirtualEvents

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Danni Czark
Senior Associate, Online Community Marketing
Cvent
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We don't have much need in our business but the certificates thing is interesting and I'd wonder if we can find a way to do it for internal events, we host contest and other things for our sales team and i manually make 2-3 dozens certificates a month for winners but will be nice to explore if there's a way to streamline that.

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Rachel Sigley
Director, Brand Marketing
Tata America International Corporation
NJ
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Hi Rachel,

There are definitely ways to streamline that through Cvent! It's always great to find a way to save time through Cvent. :) 

A few ways/ideas you can use Cvent certificates:

• First, use Internal Information to import a field for any award winners. This can be as simple as "Question: Award Winner" - "Choice: Yes." 
• Within the certificate, you can use Conditional Text or Conditional Images to populate certain details based on the response to this internal field. So, let's say everyone gets a certificate, but you'd like to include a "Winner" badge in the corner for only a certain group, that could be done!
• If the certificates are only being created for this specific group, you could simply create them on the back-end and use data tags to populate their name and other details. To send it as efficiently as possible, you can again use Internal Information and do an Advanced Search by this field when manually sending the email. 

If you have any questions, feel free to let me know! Hopefully this gave you some initial ideas on how to get started.

Best,

Danni

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Danni Czark
Senior Associate, Online Community Marketing
Cvent
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Original Message:
Sent: 03-16-2021 13:34
From: Rachel Sigley
Subject: Setting up your credits and certificates in Flex

We don't have much need in our business but the certificates thing is interesting and I'd wonder if we can find a way to do it for internal events, we host contest and other things for our sales team and i manually make 2-3 dozens certificates a month for winners but will be nice to explore if there's a way to streamline that.

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Rachel Sigley
Director, Brand Marketing
Tata America International Corporation
NJ
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We utilize thye badges portion of badges and certificates. Badges are easily set up, it seems that certificates are as well. We look forward to using that moving forward.

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Mary Ann Hall
Event Planner
Federal Reserve System
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What is the difference in the two?

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Joy Parton
Program Coordinator
Duke UniversityUnited States
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Original Message:
Sent: 03-17-2021 07:48
From: Mary Ann Hall
Subject: Setting up your credits and certificates in Flex

We utilize thye badges portion of badges and certificates. Badges are easily set up, it seems that certificates are as well. We look forward to using that moving forward.

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Mary Ann Hall
Event Planner
Federal Reserve System
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What is the difference between badge and certificate?

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Joy Parton
Program Coordinator
Duke UniversityUnited States
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Hi Joy,

Badges are used to display the attendees information.
https://support.cvent.com/s/communityarticle/Creating-Name-Badges

Certificates are used for awarding credits or acknowledging completion.
https://support.cvent.com/s/communityarticle/Awarding-Certificates

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Megan Clark
Assistant Team Lead, Online Community Marketing
Cvent
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Original Message:
Sent: 07-15-2022 10:20
From: Joy Parton
Subject: Setting up your credits and certificates in Flex

What is the difference between badge and certificate?

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Joy Parton
Program Coordinator
Duke UniversityUnited States
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Yes to all of this! We offer CE for almost all our events, and this has been a game-changer for us vs. our previous manual process!!! We do exactly what you have recommended - we tie the receipt of the CPE certificate to them completing the post-event survey. 

We do have to divide out our attendees based on whether they met the criteria or not (time attended and poll questions answered), so there is some manual work to segment out those who qualify from those who either do not qualify or did not request CPE, but other than that, it's a great automated process.

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Lori Wildman
Senior Marketing Manager
DuCharme, McMillen & Associates, Inc.
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Hi Danielle, 

Accreditation is a huge endeavor in our organization. We set our certificates very similarly to how you describe it, with one exception: we don't make it conditional on completing all the session surveys. Instead, we send a post-event email to all participants with the link to the surveys and the link to the certificate. 

A couple of tips and remarks on the current system: 
- if you have per session credit enabled, with attendees marked as participant immediately awarded the credit, note that your attendees, regardless of the time they actually spent watching the session, will be awarded the credit as soon as they click that virtual session link in the Attendee Hub. You might have to do some manual deduping to account for people who session-hopped. And don't forget to do so before posting the recording link, as watching the recording also marks attendees as session participants! 
- if you deal with credits across several events and have attendees ask you what they earned where, go to their account-level contact profile, click on Contact History, and run the Event Credits report. It's been a lifesaver for me! 
- the certificate link in the email is dynamic. If you send the email with the link during your event, or if attendees have access to the recordings in the Attendee Hub for a while afterwards, they can go back to that email, click the link again, and the number of credits on the certificate will have been updated.
- the link will stop functioning once the event is archived. 

I'm looking forward to further enhancements to that feature! It would be great to be able to correlate credit awarding to the % of time people spent in a session, using the Webex or Zoom integrations. 

Cheers,

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Béline FALZON
Conference Program Specialist II
California Teachers Association
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This is fantastic info that fits timely with our new batch of Lifelong Learning virtual classes!  Thanks so much Danni!

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Joy Parton
Program Coordinator
Duke UniversityUnited States
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