Build credibility

Credibility consists of two key components: trustworthiness and expertise. To prosper and grow an organization must have the expertise to provide a great experience and knowledge to its clients. At the same time new clients should trust the organization with their time and resources.

Credibility is not something an organization could achieve over night. It is even difficult to achieve it on the Internet. It takes time, requires skills and resources. Providing a certifications and awards and making them public is a must if an organization wants to build credibility.

Starting with Retiffy

Retiffy manages your certification process from the moment participants register, to the moment their success is promoted on the Internet.

Why issuing certificates?

Certificates and awards give credibility and visibility to your organization. It doesn’t matter if you are a university, a platform for online education or an event organizer. Every organization could benefit from certifying its clients, participants or students for their achievements. Furthermore, we as human beings love when we are acknowledged for our efforts in getting an academic degree, finishing a language course or winning a competition. When we share our certificate on the Internet our friends would learn more about your organization.

Do not worry if your certificates are not officially accredited by a Ministry for example. This would be great, but it is not mandatory for you to build credibility. What matters more in the current world is that people believe in you. To have rapport and credibility. And you could achieve this by providing a great experience to your clients and officially certifying them.

What is an Electronic Certificate?

Electronic certificate is issued by you, using Retiffy. It is entirely digital. It is securely stored and accessed. After issuing, it could be downloaded, printed and shared. It is customized to your organization. Below you can find a diagram of a real certificate used in School of robotics “Robopartans” (a premium partner).

unique number that can be used for checking the certificate
unique URL on the Internet that can be used for sharing
fields like name, city, date, description and others depending on its purpose
custom branding exactly for your organization

Since a certificate is available on the Internet, search engines index it and your organization would be found in user searches more easily . (Note: certificate visibility can be configured. Read our Privacy Policy)

Who can use Retiffy?

Retiffy is designed for organizations doing courses, competitions, seminars, workshops, and any other form of activity that requires or could benefit from an official certification. You might be working as a:

part time professional lecturer with a small group of students
local organization or university department working with hundreds or thousands of students
large international organization providing certification to much more participants

Technical Requirements

Retiffy can be used from anywhere, anytime only with your browser including desktop or mobile devices.

Creating a certification process

Certifying a person includes a number of steps. If you make a single mistake, this could destroy all the credibility you have build so far. The Retiffy team could help you build a certification process specific to the needs of your organization.

User identity

You have to make sure you are certifying the right person or organization. This might look obvious in face-to-face courses, but is a little bit more complicated when the service is provided over the Internet. Retiffy could handle the identification process. If your organization demands it, than certain documents like ID card, passport, ID Photo, might be requested from a user before a certificate is permanently issued on her name. This is all handled by the Retiffy team.

Event creation and manipulation

Certificates and awards are issued for a certain event. This might be a client fulfilling a number of requirements, student passing a test or participant finishing at a competition. Easily managing the events and its participants is a key point to a certification process.

Permanent storage

Certificates and awards are issued at a specific date to a specific person or organization for a very specific thing. A certificate never expires.

There might be cases when a person is required to retake an exam that proves he still possesses the required knowledge. Or for an organization to prove that it still provides the best quality of service. Example for organizations with such exams are TOEFL (language courses), Cisco (networking courses). But the fact that the user has taken the exam at a specific moment of her life and has received a certificate is never changed.

This means there is a requirement for certificates and certificates information to be stored permanently and securely. Retiffy has a proven backup procedure that constantly multiplies the information on a number of different machines at the same time so even in the case of a machine malfunction the information would never be lost. This is not an easy task so we recommend leaving it to Retiffy instead of trying to maintain and backup this information on your own.

Permanent access
Certificates and awards are accessed through the Internet. Retiffy provides industry class service level agreement for being up and running 99.97% of the time, which means that any information could be accessed practically without interruptions.

Using Retiffy

Creating your template

Contact us with file of you like that represents your certificates.
It could start from a common Word file and end with a fancy layered or vector graphic like psd, svg or xcf.
Make sure the images are 300 DPI if you want them to be printable.
Additional information at http://retiffy.com/en/info/how-to-create-a-template/

Issuing one certificate

Click on the desired template.
Choose “+ New certificate”.
A preview of the certificate is shown with editable fields on the right.
Once set, press “Save & Promote”.

Issuing many certificates at once

Click on the desired template.
Choose “+ Many from file”.
You can upload an Excel or CSV file with each certificate on a new line.

Detailed information at http://retiffy.com/en/info/uploading-a-document-created-from-excel/

Full list with links to all generated certificates is visible at top left.
The topmost certificate is previewed below.
The created certificates are drafts and can be edited when needed.
Once set, choose “Save & Promote”.

Promoting certificates on the Internet

Pressing the button “Save & Promote” creates a new Campaign.
You can access your campaigns from the navigation on the top.
Each campaign can be promoted at time of your convenience by choosing “Promote”.
Then you need to check, edit or create the message that will appear in the inbox of the people that are owners of the certificates.
Make sure that the message contains the placeholders #{certificate_link} and #{share_link} so that the people can access and share their certificates.
Shortly after you choose “Send” the emails will be sent and one email will be sent to the issuer to be reassured.

Retiffy and the Social networks

To the right in each certificate page, there is “Share” button to ease the user.
A link to the certificate is a link to a common web-page, which means the certificate can be shared in any social network

Example in Facebook

Example in Google+

Example in LinkedIn

Downloading all certificates at once

In the Campaigns list you can find all your promoted or not promoted campaigns.
Each campaign has a “Download” button next to the “Promote” button.
Choosing “Download” sends to your email a printer friendly PDF file with all certificates on separate pages.

Privacy

We take user privacy seriously. When and organization retiffies a person with an electronic certificate it is up to this person to configure the visibility of this certificate. It might be visible and indexed by search engines, or just visible after entering a key, or visible only to this person. The visibility of the certificate can be configured.

Should there be private information on the certificate?

Most of the time a certificate contains non private information like the name of the participant, place, city, description of the certificate.

If you absolutely need to put private information on a certificate because of requirements from a Ministry for example, then Retiffy will show this fields only to the person owning the certificate and users that this person has given permissions to.

We recommend that you read the complete Privacy Policy.

Integrating with your site

Certificates are issued by you. Retiffy manages the whole process, but it is important that the issued certificates contribute to your credibility. It makes a perfect sense to make all of your issued certificates available at your site, not at www.retiffy.com

There are a number of options.

Add a check widget on your site – every certificate has a unique number and you could add a widget on YOUR site for checking the certificates. In this way users will visit your site, type the certificate number and check whether it was issued by you.
Send certificates from your email – after issuing, Retiffy could automatically send certificates from your email. This requires some configuration just to make sure that you really own the email address, but after configured your clients would receive emails from an organization they are familiar with – your organization.

FAQ

I am using paper certificates. Is this enough?

Paper certificates are a great tool to build credibility. But often after receiving them we put them into a folder and into a cabinet and truth be told – we forget about them. Although they are a good memory, your organization could not benefit from their main goal – to present the new knowledge to the world so that you could build more credibility and attract more clients.

This is where electronic verifiable certificates from Retiffy step in. They could be downloaded and printed, but they could also be shared and tracked.

We don’t use certificates!

There are only two reasons for you not to issue certificates to your participants.

First – you do not have the time or resources to prepare and send all the certificates.
Second – you are not in business anymore.

Retiffy helps you “solve” both reasons.

It takes all the hassle from you in managing the certificates. Everything is easy, managed automatically and requires a minimal work from you.
The longer you provide a great experience and build more credibility with electronic certificates, the longer you will be in business.

No money for advertising

Organizations could ask themselves how much does it cost not to issue certificates, not to build credibility and not to provide great experience to their clients. How much does it cost in terms of loss. There is one special case and this is the Non-profit organizations. Our experience shows that they do use Retiffy to find additional sponsorship. Your sponsors would be much more willing to assist you if thousands of people could see their logo on a certificate on the Internet.

We have a similar in-house developed system

Could you send us a link to one of your certificates with statistics of how many people have seen it?

Developing a well integrated system that solves your problem is hard and expensive. Especially when it comes to making the success and achievements of your participants public to the world. Retiffy could do it for your organization since we are constantly improving the platform and you will automatically benefit from the features that thousands of other organizations need. Just Contact Us and with a little assistance from our team you could migrate all your existing database to Retiffy and have all the certificates and processes in one place.

We are not interested in the moment

The moment you realize that Retiffy would bring more to your organization might not be the right moment. Probably the competition you are organizing is in six months. You could use this time to introduce Retiffy to your organization and to issue digital certificates for past competitions. Make them visible now so that more people join in six months.

Do you have a presentation of Retiffy?

Yes, on this link could find a PDF document the that is available for offline use. It is convenient to have it if you should present the advantages to other team member or management.

Examples for certificates used in Retiffy

Organization

Retiffy is part of Robopartans Group. Our team is working in the field of education, software development and robotics.