Issuing participation certificates by hand was, for a long time, considered a perfectly acceptable inconvenience. A workshop with 50 attendees meant 50 copies of a Word document, each name typed individually, each PDF converted, and each email then composed and sent one at a time. For events of that modest scale, the process was tedious but proved survivable. However, increasingly, manual certificate generation is becoming unsustainable for event organizers around the globe. As an instance, a hybrid academic conference registering 10,000 or even a smaller-scale corporate webinar series running a few dozen sessions in a single calendar year, will barely be able to survive on manual means of generation a certificate of participation.
1EdTech inferred from its 2025 batch count that the number of digital badges issued grew remarkably from 74.7 million to 320.4 million in 2025 in just 3 years.