Create a LinkedIn badge: an announcement for the post and proof for the profile

The term carries two meanings, and that often causes confusion. Sometimes people mean one thing, sometimes the other.

The first is an image for a post. You design a graphic in the look of your event, with your logo, title and date. Your speakers and guests add their photo and name and share the image in their feed. That is how they say they're taking part.

The second is an entry on the profile. After the event you issue an attendance certificate, and people add it with one click to the Licenses & certifications section, where it stays for good.

OneClickBadge covers both meanings, so you don't have to choose between two tools.

In practice it comes down to three steps.

First, the design. You start with a ready-made template and swap the logo, colors and text for your own. If you'd rather, you can build everything from scratch. Every badge comes in a square and a portrait format for the feed, plus a full-height story format, for Instagram for example.

Second, the link. You share one link with your speakers and guests. Each person adds their own photo and name. You don't have to rebuild anything per person, and no one has to sign in.

Third, the certificate. After the event you release the proofs, and attendees pull them onto their profile through their link. That closes the arc from the announcement to the entry on the profile.

Before an event, hardly anyone talks about it. That is where the shareable badge comes in. Everyone who speaks or attends makes the event visible.

You build the badge in your event's design, once. Then you send your speakers and guests a link. They open it, drop in their photo and type their name, with no account needed. They post the result on LinkedIn.

For the stage there is the speaker badge, which puts the talk front and center. For everyone who is simply attending, a “we're attending” template fits. Both build on the same design, so the posts belong together even when many different people share them.

The reach happens out in the networks of the people who take part, away from your own channel. A speaker with a large network reaches people who would never see your own page.

After a good event, people want to show they were there. For that you issue an attendance certificate. Attendees open it through a link and get their own permanent page. From there they add it to their profile on LinkedIn with one click, in the Licenses & certifications section. That is the same spot where a course certificate sits.

What matters is what this certificate is and what it isn't. It is confirmation from you as the organizer that someone took part. The common industry term for it is a certificate of attendance. LinkedIn only provides the feature and the space on the profile.

Under the hood it is the Open Badges 2.0 standard in its hosted form. That means every proof lives at a fixed web address and can be verified there. It works with as little personal data as possible, and you can revoke it if something is ever off.

There are tools for building beautiful graphics. And there are providers that issue digital proofs. Rarely can you do both in the same place, in the same look.

A design-only program hands you an image. What comes next, getting it to the people taking part and onto their profile, you have to sort out yourself. A proof-only provider takes care of the technology behind the certificate, yet the announcement image before the event is missing.

With OneClickBadge the two fit together. The badge for the announcement and the proof for the profile carry the same design, the people taking part need no account for either step, and you manage your event in one place.

It is best to think of both moments together. Before the event, the shareable badge gets speakers and guests to carry the event into their networks. It costs you no ad and comes across as more credible than advertising, because real people stand behind it with their name.

After the event, the attendance certificate closes the loop. A day that would otherwise be over becomes an entry that stays on the profile of the people who took part, names your event again and again, and catches the eye of everyone who looks at that profile.

If you want to know how to set up your first event, the onboarding walks you through it step by step. From there it is a short way to the first badge someone shares.