Connecting with ourselves, others, and the world around us is a very human activity – recognising and celebrating participation in arts, nature, and sport add colour and flavour to our society. Badges give arts and community organisations the perfect tool for recognising the contributions individuals make to the creative and cultural landscape and fit well alongside existing development programmes, such as the Arts Award or the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award.

Hobbies can be seen as an important contributor to an individual’s employability by demonstrating they have initiative and a passion for learning in their own time. Badges in this space can often be aimed at young people as a way to certify engagement with extra-curricular activities and recognise skills development outside of the classroom. However, in an emerging freelance workforce, badges are seeing increased value in acting as professional and character references for those who engage with cultural and community activities outside of their studies or employment.

Issuing badges for engagement in arts, nature or sport is a brilliant way to reward participation in activities such as:

• Workshops, courses, and taster sessions
• Regular club attendance
• Competitions
• Community action e.g. seed planting and litter picking
• Volunteering

Along with detailing all technical skills involved with participating in an activity, consider the important attitudes and values displayed and why these are important to the sector or industry the activity relates to. This will ensure that recipients get the best value out of earning the badge.

This badge works as an example of an activity where the recipient has developed technical skills while also exploring some valuable attitudes that are desirable to employers. Its alignment with the Skills Builder Universal Framework provides an avenue for a recipient to learn about their achievement in a broader context and how they might progress these skills in future endeavours.

This format could be adapted to cover a wide range of arts, nature and sports activities where individuals engage with new concepts, ideas, skills and values, and could even be extended to further discuss applying this to practical settings, for example, if an individual goes on to carry out volunteering.

Want to use this badge? Click the link for an Excel spreadsheet containing all of the badge data, ready to be copied and customised.

To use an exemplar badge and make it your own:

1. Download the spreadsheet and customise to your needs.
2. On your digital badge issuing platform of choice, create a new badge and input the badge data from the spreadsheet.
3. Edit and adapt the data to suit your needs.
4. Publish the badge / make it available for issuing.

While all badges that follow the Open Badge Standard will contain the same core components, different issuing platforms can label and format them differently and often have different approaches to applying settings and attributes to a badge.

Don’t panic – the excel file contains all the information you’ll need to build the badge on your chosen issuing platform (full list of Open Badge platforms) and come readily formatted with instructions for three popular issuing platforms: Open Badge Factory, Navigatr, and Credly.

Consider these badges as templates – it is always recommended to ensure your badges are adapted to your needs and tailored to be relevant to your recipients. This will ensure that your badge is meaningful and valued by those you issue it to.

Examples of customising an exemplar badge to fit your needs could include:

• Expanding on the information to add specific detail about an activity you will issue the badge for.
• Adjusting language to suit your organisation’s brand.
• Adding a location.
• Removing any elements you feel are not relevant to your badge recipients.

The platform examples provided in our exemplar badges are intended to help illustrate how a set of badge data may require adjusting to fit the issuing platform being used. Which badging platform you choose will depend on the on your individual use case and the functionality you require. The Digital Badging Commission does not endorse any particular badging platform. A full list of Open Badge platforms is maintained by 1EdTech.

If you represent an Open Badge platform and would like to be included in our exemplar files, please provide us with an excel sheet containing our exemplar data mapped to your system and we will add you to the download files.