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

Process

What do we check?

General spelling, grammar, readability and conventions

• We will check for any typos or sentence structures that don’t fit with our usual conventions, or where large criteria would be better understood if split down.
• 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 will 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.

‘The Stranger Test’

• We will check that the title, description, and earning criteria are easily understood by someone 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 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 against this standard. We will check that the criteria you’ve supplied properly 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.

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 comments on your badge and help you to make updates. Once these changes are agreed we will move forward to 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.