Offering a certificate in your online course isn’t just a great way to recognize your Thinkific students’ achievements, it also boosts your credibility as a course creator.
If you’re hosting your courses on Thinkific, you can use the platform’s certificate feature to create and send students certificates. Alternatively, you can use Accredible, which is a dedicated certificate builder that integrates with Thinkific.
In this guide, we’ll give you an overview of both options so you can select the best one for your needs, and we’ll also provide a step-by-step tutorial on how to use them.
Let’s get started!
Overview of Thinkific Certificates
Thinkific has a native certificate builder that is easy to use and allows you to create and send certificates for your Thinkific courses automatically upon course completion.
The biggest advantage of using Thinkific Certificates is that it’s built right into the platform, and you don’t need to learn a new tool for creating and managing certificates. Even better, it doesn’t cost you anything extra because it’s included in Thinkific’s Start plan and above.
For creating certificates, Thinkific has a bunch of templates and gives you a few options to customize the design and content.
To start, log in to your Thinkific account, select Certificates from the Support Your Students tab, and then click the New Certificate button to open the certificate builder.
Your first step is to add a name to your certificate and choose a template. There are seven different templates available, each with a unique design.
Now, go to the Content tab to customize the information that appears on the certificate.
- Some fields, such as student name, course title, certificate ID, and issuance date, are mandatory and will appear on every certificate.
- You can display custom fields on your certificate for further customization.
- You can also change the default text that appears on your certificate.
When it comes to styling options, the certificate builder allows you to select a font and text color, upload a background image, and add your logo. Once you’re happy with how your certificate looks, you can choose which courses to award it for and set an expiration date.
But that’s it — the builder doesn’t let you move elements to a different position or change things like font sizes. It’s a bit limited in terms of design customization.
Otherwise, Thinkific’s certificate builder is very easy to use, and you can create good-looking certificates in a matter of minutes.
Why (and When to) Use Accredible vs Thinkific Certificates?
If you want more than what Thinkific Certificates offer, you may prefer Accredible, a specialized certificate builder. It provides more features and customization options than Thinkific.
Accredible has several advantages over Thinkific’s certificate builder:
- Customization: Accredible has a template library with over 40 pre-made designs and a more flexible editor to allow you to completely customize your certificate design.
- Interactivity: Each Accredible certificate has its own page that allows students to share their certificates on social media, via email, or by embedding them to their websites.
- Security: Accredible uses blockchain technology to prevent credential tampering, and the certificates can be verified.
- Analytics: It provides detailed analytics on certificate page views, downloads, and shares.
- Credential management: The platform offers advanced tools for issuing, tracking, and managing credentials.
Looking at all the features provided by Accredible, it’s clear that the platform offers superior tools for creating certificates. And since you can seamlessly integrate it with Thinkific, you can incorporate all these features into your Thinkific school.
However, not everyone needs these advanced features, so we recommend using Accredible over Thinkific Certificates in a couple of scenarios.
Use Accredible if you’re creating a certification program and not a regular online course.
A great example of a Thinkific website that uses the website to host its courses and creates and manages certificates with Accredible is Hootsuite Academy.
Use the Thinkific-Accredible integration when you want to issue professional certificates. This will add credibility to your courses, and, with all the certificate-sharing options Accredible supports, your certificates will help spread the word about your courses.
How to Set Up an Accredible Certificate for Your Thinkific Course
In this section, we’ll go through the steps to adding Accredible certificates to the courses you’ve created on Thinkific.
To get started, you’ll need to create an account on Accredible. The platform pricing starts from $960/year, but they do offer a free trial.
Now, log in to your Accredible account and go to Settings from your account menu located in the top-right part of the page. From the General Settings tab, scroll down to the bottom of the page, where you’ll see API Settings.
Make sure to tick the box that says “Automatically publish credentials created via the API,” and then click on the Manage API Keys button to access your API key. Copy your API key and then go to Thinkific’s app store from your admin account.
Next, find the Accredible app, install it, and click the Settings button.
In the Your Accredible Credentials section, paste your Accredible API key.
You’ve now connected your Accredible account with your Thinkific courses, and you can move on to the next step: designing your first certificate.
To do that, go back to your Accredible account, then from the top of the page, click on the Design tab, and you’ll see the Create Certificate Design button.
Upon clicking on it, you’ll be taken to a new page where you can choose a template.
Once you have selected one, you will notice that some text fields are already present. However, you can easily remove them. If you want to keep them, you can customize the font and size and apply different formatting options.
You also have the option to change the layout of your template by moving the elements to any part of the certificate.
The text fields on Accredible certificates are similar to the ones in Thinkific, but Accredible has more fields, known as Attributes, that will let you add more information and personalize your certificates.
For instance, you can add a grade or a URL to your Accredible certificate. And the attribute values will come from your Thinkific account. You can also use custom fields from your Thinkific account to create a custom attribute in Accredible and name it the same as your custom field in Thinkific.
To do that, go to your Accredible account and click on the Design tab → Create Certificate Design → Attributes.
At the bottom of the Attributes menu, you’ll see the Manage Attributes options. Click on it to open a new page with all available attributes.
This will open a pop-up window where you will enter the name of your Thinkific custom field in the Attribute name and Attribute Merge Tag fields in Accredible.
Once you’re done customizing the certificate, you need to create a Group, which will help you connect your Accredible certificate with your Thinkific course. So, go to your Accredible account and select the Groups tab from your dashboard.
In the upper-right corner of the page, click on Create a New Group.
This will open a new page where you can add details about your course, including the course display name for certificates.
And now that you’ve created both a certificate and a group, go back to your Thinkific account, and from Manage Learning Products, select Courses, and click on the course for which you want to enable an Accredible certificate.
Then go to the Settings tab, and from the left menu, select Course Progress and Completion.
In the Course Completion section, toggle Completion Certificates and select Accredible as your certificate solution. You will then see the option to select the certificate you’ve previously created.
In the same section, you can also set expiration dates for your courses by setting the certificate to expire after a specified number of days or on a date you specify.
And that’s it. Now, whenever a student finishes a course, a certificate will automatically generate in Accredible. And your students will see a pop-up window inside Thinkific with a link to access their certificate.
Additionally, Accredible will automatically send all students who finish a course an email with a link to their certificate.
Conclusion
Now that you have a clear understanding of what you can do with Thinkific Certificates and Accredible, you can decide which option to use for your Thinkific courses.
For most creators, the course builder’s Certificates feature will be sufficient.
However, the Thinkific and Accredible integration will be a great fit for creators who need advanced certificate features to issue professional certificates or create certification programs.
Both platforms offer a free trial to let you test the platform features, and you can get started by clicking the buttons below.
We hope you found this guide helpful. If you have any questions about using Thinkific Certificates of Accredible, let us know in the comments below.
