Quality Assurance and Publishing
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      1. Real Ideas Help Center
      2. Badge Nation
      3. Quality Assurance and Publishing

      How does the Badge Nation Quality Assurance and Publishing process work?

      When you submit a new badge for quality assurance (QA), the Badge Nation team can get to work!

      We can only carry out quality assurance for organisations that have purchased or activated a membership package to join Badge Nation. Badges submitted by organisations that have not yet joined will have the Badge Status set to 'Draft' by our team with an invite to get in touch.

      The QA process is designed to make sure you’re getting the most out of your Badge Nation Membership and support you in writing great badges.

      Every single badge submitted for QA is reviewed by the human heart and mind of a member of our team within 2 weeks of submission.

      Read below to find out about what we check for and the actions we take.

      Overview

      QA

      Process

      1. Badge Writer creates draft badge in Badge Zone.                                                                         

      2. Badge Writer submits badge for QA.

      3. Badge Nation reviews badge.

      a) Updates required on badge.
      i. Badge Nation leaves comment and sets badge status to ‘Pending’.
      ii. Badge writer edits badge and re-submits for QA for further review.

      b) No updates required on badge. Badge moves to step 4.

      4. QA is complete. Badge Nation updates badge status to ‘Ready for Publishing’.

      5. Badge Nation creates visual (if required) and publishes badge to issuing platform.

      6. Badge is ready to issue.

      What do we check?

      General spelling, grammar, readability and conventions

      We check for any typos or sentence structures that don’t fit with our usual conventions, where information would be better understood if split down / merged, or unnecessary repitition.
      • We will amend typos and easily corrected deviation from our badge writing conventions as part of the process.

      Skills tags

      Skills tags are important ingredients in a badge.

      • We check that the skills tags you have supplied are properly evidenced in your earning criteria.
      • It is best practice to keep these tags as streamlined as possible, so we may remove duplicates, similarly named tags that cover the same skill, or skills that aren’t referenced in earning criteria.
      • Following working on your badge, we may run your badge through the skills scanner to check if there are any valuable tags that could be added, or add new tags that you have mentioned in earning criteria but not included as tags.

      The 'Stranger Test’

      The 'Stranger Test' ensures that your badge can be easily understood by a reader that is unfamiliar with your organisation or the activities described in your badge. This is extremely important to support your earners to get the best use out of their badges when explaining their skills and experience, and also for potential employers that could be viewing digital badges in their recruitment process.
      • We check that the information in the title, description, and earning criteria is clear and easy to understand, including references to acronyms or abbreviations.
      • We may get in touch with you at this stage if we believe your badge does not pass the 'Stranger Test' and would benefit from additional information or clarification.

      Mapping to the RSA Badge Standard

      All Badge Nation badges are quality assured to this standard.

      • We check that the information you’ve supplied aligns with the layer of the standard that you have selected (Engage, Participate, Demonstrate or Lead).
      • We may get in touch with you at this stage if we believe your badge might be better suited to a different layer of the Badge Standard, or if additional information would help cement the badge at a relevant layer.

      What happens next?

      Comments

      If your badge doesn’t require any updates to the information you’ve submitted, we will move forward with publishing your badge to your organisation's chosen issuing platform.

      If during the QA process we think your badge could do with some work to get it looking and reading its best we will leave a comment with our feedback, which generates an auto-email to the address associated with your Badge Zone account.

      If we are working on multiple badges for you or feel as though you'd benefit from more detailed feedback, we may also reach out to you via email to avoid too many auto-communications from clogging up your inbox.

      Once you have actioned the feedback by saving changes to your badge, re-submit for QA so we can repeat the QA process until your badge is ready for publishing.

      Publishing:

      When the QA process is complete, your badge is ready for publishing! We will publish it to your organisation's issuing platform of choice and you will receive a notification that the badge is now live and available for issuing.