Bring your Data to Life...
The Gravity Forms Quiz Add-on is a great tool for building tests/quizzes that can automatically grade and score users’ responses. But when it’s time to give life to those achievements, how can you turn all that data into impressive, stylish certificates automatically, so your users can show off and be proud of their new achievement?
Make it Significant with a Digital Certificate 🎵
Let’s say you own a large, successful, cafe and you regularly hire temporary staff to help run it. You want to ensure that proper safety procedures are followed by everyone, so you create a Food Safety & Sanitation quiz using Gravity Forms and include it in your hiring process. After an applicant has passed, you are now tasked with bestowing them an official document that certifies their accomplishment. Enter: Gravity PDF! 
Gravity PDF Certificates are functional, highly customizable, and stylish templates that are easy to set up. In this guide you’ll learn how to automatically generate and email a certificate after passing a Gravity Forms quiz. Let’s jump right in! 
1. Create Quiz Form
For this guide we’ll be using the Gravity Forms Quiz add-on. If this is your first time using this add-on, we recommend watching this video tutorial from Gravity Forms before proceeding.
If you want to follow along you can download this form export (right click and save as) and then import it onto your site. If you’d rather build your own quiz, along with the questions for the quiz, you will need to include both a Name field and an Email field. Don’t forget to hit that Save Form button when done.
Once you’ve got all the questions added, hover over Settings at top of the Form Editor and select Quiz from the sub-menu. This will take you to the Gravity Forms Quiz add-on settings. By default, the grading settings is set to None. Select Pass/Fail to open up the Pass/Fail Grading Options.
NOTE: It’s also possible to assign a letter grade based on various percentage scores you’ve set. You can do this by selecting the Letter option under the Grading Settings.
In the Pass Percentage, input the minimum percentage you require for a user to pass the quiz. To those following along with our example scenario, let’s set the pass percentage to 100% since we’re attesting to a Food Safety certification.
Below this, you’ll see two confirmation messages:
- The Quiz Confirmation setting is shown when a user has passed the quiz
- The Quiz Fail Confirmation setting is shown when a user has failed the quiz, based on the Pass Percentage setting you’ve set
Use the rich text editor in each setting to write an appropriate message. You can include quiz merge tags in either confirmation message to dynamically display personalized information, like the results, score, or percentage.
For our cafe example we’ll be including the following message when the quiz is passed:
Quiz Results: You Passed!
Score: {quiz_score}
Percentage: {quiz_percent}%
And this is what will be displayed when a user doesn’t get above the Pass Percentage threshold:
Quiz Results: You Failed!
Score: {quiz_score}
Percentage: {quiz_percent}%
2. Set up Notification Emails
Let’s set up the emails that will be sent when the quiz form is completed. From the Form Editor screen, hover over Settings in the top menu bar again and then click Notifications.
Add a new notification and fill in the required details: Name, Send To, Subject, and Message. We want to send the notification to the Email field we’ve added during the form creation (Step 1). To do this, choose Select a Field under the Send To option, and select Email in the dropdown.
If this is your first time creating a Notification, check out the Gravity Forms docs for a more detailed guide.
Like the Quiz Confirmation messages, you can make use of the Quiz add-on merge tags in the Notification Message.
To ensure the correct email is sent, enable the Conditional Logic setting towards the bottom of the Notification page. You will need to set the condition to Quiz Pass/Fail is Pass from the respective dropdown menus. Click Update Notification to save.
Create the second notification by repeating the same steps above, but this time change the Conditional Logic setting to the Fail option in the third dropdown. Save when done.
Finally, we’ll create a notification email that’ll be sent to the cafe’s business owner with the results. It’s a similar process to the user notifications, but you will enter a fixed email address (and not use the Email field from the form), and don’t need to enable conditional logic. Don’t forget to save when done.
3. Create a Gravity PDF Certificate
Time to make that impressive looking certificate! 📃✨ Go to the Forms List page, hover over the form you’re working on, then the Settings link, and finally select the PDF menu that appears. On the page that loads, add a new PDF.
We will go through each section of the PDF settings in detail. If it’s your first time creating a PDF, this is the perfect chance to familiarize yourself with the common settings (General and Appearance sections) available in Gravity PDF.
General
Complete the two required fields when creating a PDF: Label and Filename. Then under Notifications, select the Pass user notification email you set up in Step 2 so that the PDF will be automatically included as a file attachment. Like the user notifications, we’ll toggle the Enable Conditional Logic setting so that the PDF will only be enabled if the Quiz Pass/Fail is Pass.
Gravity PDF offers six functional and highly customizable certificate templates which you can personalize from top to bottom. In this example, we’re going to use Charlie, which has a clean and subtle design, and is a good pick for a Food Safety and Sanitation certificate. Click on the Template dropdown option and select Charlie, or, if you haven’t installed it yet, select the Manage button to bring up the PDF Template Manager and upload the certificate template zip after purchasing from our store.
Click Add PDF button to save.
Appearance
All Gravity PDF Certificates are built with an auto-scaling system that means you are free to use any standard or non-standard paper sizes, in either portrait or landscape orientation. If using a non-standard paper (A4 or Letter), you may need to adjust the Font Size setting up to down to suit.
In this example, let’s select A4 for the Paper Size and Landscape as the orientation.
Every Certificate template comes with a recommended Font and Font Size that works well when using A4 or Letter paper. You can find this information in the certificate template documentation, or when viewing the individual template in the PDF Template Manager. We’ll stick with the recommended font for Charlie that is automatically installed with the template: Open Sans at 16pt. But you are welcome to use any font you like, or install your own. 👍
Just like any other Gravity PDF template, you have the option to enable the Reverse Text (RTL) option if you’re using languages that are written from right to left, like Arabic, Hebrew, or Persian.
Remember to select the Update PDF to save any changes made before proceeding to the next section.
Template
The Template section of the PDF settings changes with the specific template you have chosen in the General section. For Certificate, these settings are standardized and they will remain the same no matter which design you chose. This allows you to easily switch between the certificates without losing your Template settings.
Let’s discuss in detail what each of these settings can do:
- You can brand your certificate by adding your own Logo. We recommend you upload a 500px image with a file size under 1MB (the smaller the better) to ensure the certificate generates quickly.
- Enter the name of your company or establishment in the Business Name field which will be displayed just below the logo you’ve uploaded. This is an optional setting and can be left blank.
- Choose a Title for your Certificate. By default, this is set to CERTIFICATE, but you can change this to suit any occasion.
- The Subtitle describes the type of certificate you’re presenting. Commonly used terms for this are: APPRECIATION, COMPLETION, etc.
- The Introduction is a short line of text that connects the Title and Subtitle to the Awardee Name. Commonly used terms for this are: is awarded to, is presented to.
- The Awardee Name displays the name of the person receiving the certificate. This will 99.99% of the time be a merge tag. Click on the merge tag icon and select the tag(s) for the user’s name.
- Additional Information is a good place to include a brief description of why the person is receiving the certificate.
- Input the Date of when the certificate was awarded. You can use the Entry Date merge tag to automatically display the date the quiz was completed. Makes things easier!
- The Date Label is a short text below the Date. By default, it’s set to DATE, but feel free to change or translate it to suit your needs.
- You can include a Signature by uploading an image file of the signature you want to use. For best results, upload using a transparent background at 250px with a file size of 200KB (or under) so the PDF generates quickly.
- The Signature Label is a short text below the Signature. Adding the name of the person whose signature is used is a good choice, but, again, you can add whatever you want here.
NOTE: You are welcome to use merge tags anywhere you see the merge tags icon { · · }.
We aren’t going to make any changes under the Advanced Section for this document, so please skip it over. You can read our documentation if you want to find out more about this section.
Click the Update PDF to save/update all the changes made.
4. Test the Certificate
Now that all the personalization is done, it’s time to check if the PDF is working properly. Head to the form’s Entries List Page and submit a test entry that passes the quiz. Once submitted, head back to the Form List Page, hover over the test entry, then select the View PDF link and admire the beauty of your newly created certificate. ✨
Finishing up!
You’ve now learned how to set up a Quiz form and build a fantastic looking Gravity PDF Certificate to automatically deliver to users who passed your quiz. Congratulations on your newly acquired knowledge. 🤝 Now go forth and certify those achievements with style!
If you’re interested in other ways you can use Gravity PDF to automate your business processes, we suggest reviewing other articles in our How To series. If you want to hear directly from other fellow Gravity PDF users, we also have a video Case Study series worth checking out.
If you liked this How To Guide don’t forget to share it on Facebook, Twitter, or any other social media you might be using.
