How to send digital certificates for free with Office Mail Merge (+ alternatives)

Are you training, educating or coaching people in any form and looking for a way to send them a digital certificate?

The benefits for sending digital certificates are endless. Perhaps you want to acknowledge someone’s accomplishment, increase the perceived value of your course or simply leave a lasting experience.

In this article you will learn about three simple ways to create and send digital certificates to your participants. This will contribute to a great learning experience and will save you a bunch of time!

1) Use Mail Merge (FREE with Microsoft Word) to create and send your certificates

With the functionality of mail merge (included in the standard version of Microsoft Word) you can create your certificate templates for free in Word and automatically fill all the recipient information using Excel.

Here is a step-by-step guide for you:

I) Open your Word and insert any image files and texts that you want to use for your certificate and leave a dedicated space for the recipient information.

Start by inserting an image file in your Word document (you can download certificate templates right here)

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II) Click on “Start Mail Merge”, select “Step-by-Step Mail Merge Wizard” and go through the following steps:

Start the Mail Merge Wizard in your certificate document

Select letters in the Mail Merge Wizard

Select “use the current document”

Select “Use an existing list” and upload your recipient list

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In case you didn't prepare your recipient list, you can open excel and make sure that you have one column with all of your recipient names

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Click on “more items” and select the column that includes all of your names

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Insert the placeholder for the recipient name into your certificate design

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Skip to the 6th step and click on “print” and select “print all”

Now select “Microsoft Print to PDF”

You successfully created multiple certificates with MS Office Mail Merge!

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2) Use this free and straight forward certificate generator

As you’ve probably noticed, Mail Merge is not exclusively meant for certificate creation and therefore it is more of a hack that feels a little bit clunky to use.

There are free solutions on the internet that allow you to generate certificates for participants in an easier (and nicer!) way. This is how you can create your certificates with them:

I) Open https://www.virtualbadge.io/resources/certificate-generator and follow the step-by-step guide:

Select one of the templates that fits your training or course

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Edit the certificate template to your needs: Change the text fields, upload your logo, etc.

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Edit the placeholder for your recipients — this field will automatically be replaced by your uploaded recipients in the next step

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Either upload entire CSV files that you already prepared for MS Word Mail Merge or…

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… add single recipient names to personalize the certificate — when you’re done you can simply click on download

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Each certificate created will be downloaded in a separate file, making the distribution process easier for you.

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3) Use the Virtualbadge.io tool to automatically create, send, manage and validate your certificates

To mention it before any confusion comes up — this alternative is great solution for any educational provider that issues certificates on a regular basis and not necessarily for occasional issuers.

With this tool, you are be able to…

…manage multiple course certificates from one place

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…further personalize your certificates with profile pictures and custom fields

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…send personalized certificates with one click via the included email sending service

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...simply add new recipients to existing campaigns

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…resend lost certificates with one click

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…protect your certificates from fraud with a QR code validation

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…integrate your recipient’s certificates into LinkedIn to benefit from word-of-mouth marketing

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…analyze your certificate engagement with analytic functionalities

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Conclusion

As you can see, there are various ways to approach the topic of creating and sending professional digital certificates which don’t necessarily require lavish budgets.

In the end, different companies are on different levels and it should be a strategic decision for every educational provider to determine the required degree of professionality regarding the certification process.

In case you decide to professionalize your digital certificates, you can talk to one of our experts. You will receive an individual and free consultation covering how your company can benefit from certification processes on Virtualbadge.io.

You can directly book this appointment via the following link: https://calendly.com/virtualbadge-demo/15-minutes

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