Creating Professional Certificates

How to Create Professional Breeding Certificates

There are many different things you should keep in mind while creating breeding certificates. I wanted to write an article to address as many of them as I could thing of, mainly because I realized I had the experience, knowledge, and good will to help and give advice to those people who either don’t know how, or who may realize their certificates don’t follow many of these guidelines.

Remember, as a model horse stable owner, you have the right to provide whatever type of certificate you desire, but if you wish to have repeat customers, you need to provide the type of service they expect. Part of this service is a reliable, presentable, and correct breeding certificate.

Format

Since I don’t have any experience with Macs, I’ll be discussing programs available on PCs. The best program to choose is the one you feel most comfortable with. There is no point having high expectations for your certificate but struggling for hours with a program you don’t understand.

Probably the most popular program is Microsoft Word. All of the new versions have a table option, which provides a very efficient and clean way to present the pedigree. Using the different types of font can result in a very nice, professional look. Tips: Use bold for headings, italics for special information, such as your email address, and normal text for the basic information.

Excel is an even more straightforward program for creating tables. You can use the line tool to underline the text in your pedigree and the merge cell option to put lines of text, such as descriptions, in.

Information

This is the most information that should be present somewhere on the page.

• The foal’s entire pedigree, anywhere from 4-6 generations complete
• The foal’s basic information
• Basic information on both parents (i.e. birth date, color, breed, gender, etc)
• Your contact information
• The name of your stable/ your logo

This information can be presented one of two ways, typically. You can fit it all onto one page, usually with the basic information at the top and the pedigree on the bottom, or as two separate pages, with the pedigree on one and the basic information on the other.

The Professionalism

Now, anyone can do the above things and still create a, shall we say it, crappy product. The professionalism comes through in the details. Follow these rules and I hope you can see the difference!

• If there are any “unknowns” in the pedigree, you better make sure you have extensively researched as much as you are able to make sure you can’t find the names that fit into that space. I received a certificate that had a real horse with a very distinct name with parents as unknown. One plug into allbreed and I was able to find the parents. That’s just lazy.
• Don’t assume allbreed is the dictionary. It is rife with misspellings, wrong parents, wrong dates, colors, etc. If it is a rare breed or not a popular horse, do research through real horse stable sites to double check information or find missing information. Make SURE your dates, colors, and parents are correct before you send it to a customer that may double check (and when the customer retypes the pedigree, normally they do check).
• Use spell check, check your grammar, read it over thrice, and check the print preview of the final product before you send it.
• Make sure your pedigree aligns within itself and there are no lines that drop down a second line, as this creates confusion. With all the tools available in word processing programs, there is no excuse to have a sloppy pedigree.

I hope this helps improve many of the pedigree certificates that get sent out!