OBF - Issuing to a parent / guardian on an earner’s behalf

Find out more about issuing badges to a parent or guardian.

If it is not possible to issue badges directly to an earner and you are required to use the email address of a parent / guardian to accept a badge on an earner’s behalf, be sure to consider the following:

Lawful Basis
Ensure you have a lawful basis for processing the email address of a parent / guardian. For more information on please see Earner Personal Data, Consent and GDPR for Issuing Digital Badges.

The easiest way to navigate this is to supply information about digital badges and request consent from the parent / guardian, or create a Badge Application to automate the process and enable the parent / guardian to volunteer the earner’s name and an appropriate email address.

Always add the earner’s name when issuing the badge manually via email.
While you can issue badges using only an email address, adding the earner’s name ensures that:

• The email recipient is aware of who the badge is for.
• The earner’s name is added to any badge PDF certificates (if issuing via PDF is enabled on your OBF Pro account).
• The earner’s name is added to your issuing statistics reports for easy review.

Consider how the earner will use the badge in the future.
If your badges make a great addition to a digital CV, your earners may want to store their badge in a passport or digital badge wallet. It is easy to link OBF badges on our under 18s passport My Skills Backpack, but for this to work, the email address that the badge was issued to needs to be added to the passport account. This can be supported and managed by the parent / guardian, please see My Skills Pass/Backpack - Set up an account for more information on setting up a My Skills Backpack account.

Avoid issuing a badge to a single organisational email address in bulk.
While it might sound attractive to issue your badge repeatedly to a single email address (e.g. a school) to then share out individual assertions, this is not recommended because:

• It is not possible to issue a badge repeatedly to a single email address at one time.
• This practice creates problems should the earner wish to display their badge in a passport. They will be unable to add and verify the organisational email address that the badge was issued to, Even if they were enabled to add and verify the email address with support from the organisation, their passport account would then include all assertions of this badge on their passport account.

Parents / Guardians that will be managing badges on behalf of an earner can see this guide for more information.

If you have any questions about the practice of issuing digital badges to parents or guardians, don’t hesitate to get in touch and we will be delighted to chat.