Recently, we framed a 40-year long-service certificate for a client. The employee it was awarded to started working when the Chrysler Valiant was the best-selling car in the country, bread cost 3 cents a loaf, and it would be three years before SABC broadcast TV.

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That level of employee loyalty is almost unheard of these days, and yet, when you consider the cost of employee turnover, it makes sense to recognise the commitment. It’s not just the obvious costs like an angry employee dragging you off to the CCMA, or one defecting to the competition with the customer list, it’s the cost of finding a replacement and training them, and of all the mistakes they'll make till they get past the learning curve.

We’ve been supplying framed long-service certificates for so long we should probably get one ourselves.

Whether it's 40 years or just a 5-year long service award, it’s normally part of something special – an award ceremony – and it’s probably the cheapest part of the ceremony. But, the certificate is the whole point of the event, so you want to make sure you get it right.

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Chucking a certificate of this sort – or any other sort, really – into some crappy frame from the local stationer completely devalues it. We’ve seen some disasters over the years. The frame must showcase the certificate.

 

Frame focus

Popping down to Makro for 10 frames is fine, but if you’re doing more of them you’re going to struggle to find enough matching stock. We make all our own frames from lengths of framing section. When it comes to something like a 5-year service certificate, or perhaps certificates for a sales or performance incentive program, where you might be giving out a bunch of them over time, we’ll advise you as to which sections are stocked by many suppliers, so they’re likely to be available long into the future.

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Glass is heavy and fragile and prone to breaking without too much encouragement. The last thing you want is to hear a tinkling sound as you open the box of certificates an hour before the ceremony. To prevent this from happening, we can use clear plastic instead of glass when framed certificates are going to be sent by post. The clear plastic is transparent, just like a matt finish glass, but it’s obviously a lot stronger.

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Most of us couldn’t tell if a page was slightly off-centre just by holding it up, but, as soon as you pop it into a frame, it’s obvious if one side of the certificate is closer to the other. It looks awful. Many framers don’t have the facility to print or foil certificates. We do. If one copy comes out slightly off, it’s easy to print it again to make sure it’s perfect. There are never going to be delays waiting for another copy to come from the printer.

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Deadlines and delivery times

How do you make sure your certificates will be ready on time? Nobody wants to be the person giving the awkward explanation that the entire point of the evening – the actual award – didn’t arrive. We've never missed a deadline.

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In fact, we’re very comfortable with tight deadlines. The biggest pressure we've been under is with a client we’ve been doing awards for every year for the last decade. The director signs each certificate personally by hand but, of course, it’s no easy task to pin him down for long enough to sign 240 of them. His secretary eventually got them to us 2 days before the event, and we had to pull an all-nighter to get them framed and delivered on time. So we did.

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How do you spell that?

Perhaps an even worse faux pas than late certificates is ones riddled with spelling mistakes – not just as part of the certificate, but in the employee's name. In the past someone had to be given the job of writing every name onto the certificates – imagine writing those 240 (and often there are more) names out by hand. Anyone can be careful for the first hundred or so, but after that spelling mistakes inevitably creep in. How valued does Bob feel when the name on his certificate says ‘Rob’? We’ve solved this problem by printing the names onto the certificates from a list. Email us a spreadsheet or list with everyone’s names, and we’ll print them in at the same time as we print the certificates. And, we can also print a signature, so you can avoid having to tie the boss down to sign them all.

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You know what to do...

We will design, print, frame and deliver your certificates to you, taking the hassle out of the process, and ensuring you get what you need when you need it. So, if you’re thinking of giving long service certificates to your employees, suppliers or customers, and want excellent service and a superior product, please give us a call today.