Training is a part of an employee’s growth path. Without acquiring new skills, a career will stand still, and yet no ambitious employee or employer who cares about his or her team wants to do so. That is why training for employees is something so necessary, but everyone who has ever conducted it realizes that their organization requires effort.

At Startquestion, our mission is to show you how online surveys can be used to automate your activities – reducing effort, costs and improving the quality of work.

That is why we present to you our idea to automate the generation of certificates for training participants, which they can immediately publish on social networks (mostly LinkedIn). From the article you will learn:

– What should the knowledge test look like after the training,

– How to automatically pass the survey results to the certificate generation tool (APItemplate)

– And how to do all this without the need to involve the IT team and incur costs of integration, i.e. using Zapier.

For the start, what can you expect?

The end goal of the integration is the email with enclosed certificate which all participants could get on their personal address:

Certificate itself can look for example like this:

How did the survey results become a LinkedIn certificate?

Thanks to Zapier integration generating this kind of certificate after your training will demand… just a click. But we are sure you are as curious as we are and would like to know what is happening behind the scenes. 

APItemplate is a software which allows its users to auto-generate images and PDF documents. In our case thanks to Zapier integration the results collected in Startquestion survey are transformed into PDF and are ready to share on LinkedIn profile. It means that after completing the survey all participants can automatically get a certificate proving that they finish the training on their emails in the format which let them publish it immediately on LinkedIn. 

Benefits of this integration

If you decide to integrate Startquestion and APItemplate through Zapier, you can expect few big benefits:

1. Automatization of training process – you can use your time to make your trainings programs better, instead of wasting it for certificate generation,
2. No effort with creating personalized certificates for each participant. You don’t have to rewrite or even collect data – all informations will automatically appear on the image.   

But let’s start from the beginning. 

How to achieve these benefits? Integration step by step

Step 1: Startquestion form

As you may already know, Startquestion is a platform to generate surveys and forms. It’s very easy and handy to create one of them. You simply create an account (first 14 days is a trial period, so you can try it completely for free) and prepare your post training survey, which can look like below: (from articles User Guide you can learn how easy and fast is to create new survey on Startquestion):

This particular survey is made in the format of knowledge test and contain:

• short introduction (you can see it above) when You inform respondents what will be the benefits of the quiz,
• questions which what you would like to check the participants knowledge level (example on the picture below)

points assignment – Startquestion allows you to assign points to each answer in your quiz or knowledge test. So if in the test there is a good and bad answer, you can easily have all the information here and in the end automatically count the points collected by the respondent and display the results of the test.

• information about participants. At the very end of our quiz we added the question about the name. This information is very important, because thanks to integration, this name will occur on each person’s LinkedIn certificate.

• question about email to which the certificate should be send:

• thank You page, where you decide what will be displayed on the respondent’s screen after finishing the test. In this case it is percentage result and number of points each person has got. 

On the respondent’s screen it may look like this:

Of course the online knowledge test presented above is just an example prepared by our experts – you can create your own survey without as many questions, answers and points, as you want. 

Step 2: APItemplate

The second platform you will need is APItemplate. It’s a really amazing platform for generating images and PDFs from templates. We’ve already done all the work to show you how it can look inside the tool:

This is the template of the certificate which we showed you in the beginning of this article. In APItemplate you are able to create it exactly as you want. The most important thing for our integration is a part with the name, on the example above is: Marcin Racino. This part will be generated automatically thanks to Zapier automation (data from the survey we showed in Step 1).

On the right you can see the field with a name: quiz_respondent_name

Save the changes and we can jump to the last tool we will need in this automation – Zapier.

Step 3: Zapier – tool where the magic is happening 

• After logging in to Your Zapier account you will have to Create Zap (menu on the left)

• First you should add something which will trigger the automation. In this case from the list of possible softwares you should choose Startquestion. As a trigger event choose: New survey response. 
• Next, you are choosing the amount you would like to take the survey from (the same Startquestion account on which you’ve already created the test from 1st step in our article).

• After clicking the Continue button you will have to set up a trigger. Clicking on the survey field you will be able to see all projects from your Startquestion account. Choose the one with the test after training. 

Then you can test the trigger and go to the next step. 

• Now it’a a time to set an action point for automation. From the list of programs choose APItemplate, an awesome tool which we described before. As an Action event we are choosing the action we want to happen. in this case is: Create Image. As you have it settled, click Continue and set up action by choosing previously created image (certificate pattern).

• In the next step what you have to do is to fill Overrides field. Here we have to come back to Step 2, so open your APItemplate project. In the upper menu, next to the Image editor you used before you have the Zapier/Integromat tab. Click on it and scroll down, to the field: quiz_repondent_name.txt 

Copy this value and paste it in the empty Overrides field on the left.

• On the right field choose from which question from the previous created survey the information about the name should be take from:

After clicking Continue, you can test the integration just like before, click: Turn on the Zap and… that’s it!

Step 4 (the last one): Gmail

Here you will send the generated image (certificate) on participants email account. 

• Click on “+” and as the next action point, choose Gmail from the tools list. As an action event choose: Send email and click Continue. 
• Connect to your Gmail account
•  In the Set up action field you have to choose the place from where the information about participant’s email addresses are saved. It’s one of the answer to question asked in the end of Quiz from step 1.

• Choose sender of the e-mail below
• Write the title of email: for example: Congratulations for finishing the training! Here is your certificate and the body of the message with a certificate. In the body you can insert dynamically the data from survey, like participants name:

• The last thing to do is in the Attachment field. Here you should choose: Download URL Png option

Once you do it, click continue and… it’s done.

In the end all your steps in Zapier should have green check on the left, like presented below:

Now you have to just give a name (on the left) and turn on (on the right) the Zap. You should see something like this on your screen:

Make your trainings better – connect knowledge tests with APItemplate and Gmail by Zapier (Zapier survey)

To summarize, what you have to do is very simple:

1. Create online knowledge test on Startquestion (Step 1)
2. Create image with certificate on APItemplate (Step2)
3. Create zap on Zapier which connects Startquestion, APItemplate and Gmail (Step3 )

Remember that you’re doing it only once and then all the certificates are generated automatically! For ever (or as long as you need it :))!

We will not cover the full manual here but If you have any questions and doubts or would like to talk about how to implement Zapier automation regarding online surveys/forms with your software, please contact us here: contact@startquestion.com or book a video call with our representative.