Before a physician trained in Cairo can practice in the U.S., before an engineer from São Paulo can apply for an H-1B visa, before a student in Lagos can enroll at an American grad school, they need to translate their education and qualifications into U.S. terms.
That’s precisely what Educational Credential Evaluators (ECE) does.
Founded in Milwaukee in the 1980s, ECE is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit public service organization that specializes in comparing academic and professional degrees earned outside the United States and Canada to North American educational standards.
Traditionally, evaluators like ECE send reports directly to institutions, which means the people whose education gets assessed have little say in how their results are shared. In 2025, ECE set out to change that with a new program called Insignia™. Using Accredible, ECE issues a digital credential — containing a verified record of an evaluation — that earners can share with anyone.
As you can imagine, Insignia took off fast. Yet earners weren’t sharing their digital credentials as much as ECE hoped. So Nickie Meinolf, Director of Digital Marketing, Leigh Lane Peine, Senior Director, Marketing & Client Solutions, and Ben Iberle, Information Systems Specialist, brought in Accredible Professional Services to get their marketing flywheel spinning. In just one quarter, LinkedIn badge sharing jumped by 133%.
Increase in LinkedIn badge sharing in one quarter
Increase in credential share rate in one quarter
Integration changes needed
“There are certain segments of our customers who haven’t seen or used a digital badge before. Education was going to be important and a key part of boosting our brand visibility.”
Ben Iberle, Information Systems Specialist
Nickie and Ben were pleasantly surprised by how positively people responded to Insignia digital credentials. “So many people were interested in the product. We were getting really high percentages of people accessing the badge and certificate right away,” Ben says.
But sharing lagged behind. People weren’t entirely sure how to share their digital credential, and more importantly, why they should. As Nickie puts it, “We had some instructions for sharing, but they were kind of buried in our FAQs.”
To get the engagement they wanted — and to help end users get the full value out of Insignia — ECE needed to send more reminders about how sharing their digital credential could help them in their careers, without going overboard (sending way too many emails) or adding complexity (making it seem hard to do).
For a lean team, writing email campaigns, producing additional enablement assets like videos, and tweaking the language on the digital credentials themselves was a big ask. Especially given ECE’s unique audience.
“There are certain segments of our customers who haven’t seen or used a digital badge before,” Ben highlights. “Education was going to be important and a key part of boosting our brand visibility.”
“Having Accredible Professional Services was tremendously helpful. Making all this content was a lot of work. We have a pretty lean team, so it just made our lives so much easier.”
Nickie Meinolf, Director of Digital Marketing
To build on that strong start, Nickie, Leigh, and Ben turned to Accredible’s Professional Services team for help. “Ultimately, we were trying to be innovative with Insignia and wanted that to carry through into how we marketed it to our customers and end users,” Nickie said.
Accredible Professional Services (PS) could not only help with the marketing workload, but also ensure ECE’s secure, verifiable digital credentials were shared in ways that lent trust, authenticity, and credibility to the ECE brand. They did this by:
Accredible’s Professional Services team knew they couldn’t market to people they didn’t know, and ECE’s audience is about as broad as it gets.
“We have an incredibly varied customer base coming from every background imaginable, from every country in the world,” Ben explains. “So communication is something we’re always trying to improve.”
Before suggesting any new marketing tactics, the PS team started with the fundamentals, mapping out ECE’s earner base and why each group may (or may not) want to share their ECE Insignia badge and certificate on social media. They were:
Talking it through with the ECE team, the first two — students and people looking to get hired — were the highest-priority segments. Knowing this upfront helped the PS team narrow down which communication channels to focus on and tailor messaging around digital credentials for those groups.
ECE had a landing page describing what the Insignia package included: a digital badge and certificate, plus a discounted way to order official report copies, as well as some sharing instructions.
But the page didn’t explain how specific audiences would benefit from the Insignia digital credential, where they could share it, or how to get the most impact from it.
With audience mapping complete, the PS team reworked the landing page with a new wireframe and copy tailored to each audience type, and capped it off with a glowing testimonial.
“It was super helpful to have those simplified directions broken out for everyone,” Nickie says. Even for their own customer support team.
“Any time we can offer the support team a place to direct people instead of making them hunt for an answer is great. It’s something they didn’t have before.”
Another easy win was turning on the Accredible share options on ECE’s credential pages, so earners saw them the moment they opened their credential.
The revised landing page and the added share button nudged earners to share, but a few more reminders would help ECE get the kind of reach they wanted on social media.
To do that without overwhelming earners, the PS team outlined a series of assets. It involved:
Earners are already waiting on an email containing their report and digital credential, so they are primed to open it. Making that first email crystal clear — and then following up with a few more, spaced out over several weeks — would keep the Insignia badge top of mind.
The PS team designed a four-email campaign:
Email 1 congratulates the earner on their ECE evaluation and Insignia badge, with instructions on how and where to share it. It also explains why earners should consider sharing their digital credential, backed by stats like “91% of employers look for digital credentials” and “86% say they’re more likely to interview someone with a relevant digital credential” from Accredible’s 2025 State of Credentialing Report.
Email 2 gives earners a head start on LinkedIn: sample posts for international students and working professionals that they can copy, paste, and personalize.
Email 3 is a quick reminder to “take 2 minutes” to share, with three-step instructions and a quote from Rahimullah, a real Insignia earner, on how his ECE report helped him qualify for similar roles.
Email 4 thanks earners for sharing their digital credential and invites them to share their story for the ECE website or social channels, framing it as a way to “help other Insignia earners see what’s possible.”
Next, the PS team drafted an article on credential translation and international mobility. This evergreen piece would live on the ECE blog as a resource for anyone who wants to learn more about what the Insignia badge is and how it works.
To help illustrate that, the blog includes:
“Accredible did a really excellent job capturing ECE’s voice, and working with our team to make sure it was digestible to our audience,” says Nickie. “The blog is a nice way to share realistic stories, and we can amplify it on social as another way for people to learn more about Insignia.”
For earners who have never heard of a digital credential, video made it easier to picture what the ECE Insignia badge looks like and how to share it. “Visuals always tend to work well,” Nickie remarks. “They’re just easier for people to comprehend.”
Accredible’s Professional Services team scripted a walkthrough video highlighting platform features and how to contact ECE customer support and the Accredible helpdesk. This video is featured on the Insignia landing page.
“Having Accredible Professional Services was tremendously helpful,” says Nickie. “Making all this content was a lot of work. We have a pretty lean team, so it just made our lives so much easier.”
If ECE wanted to send separate emails to different parts of its audience, it would require a huge technical lift. So before assuming segmentation was a must-have, the Accredible PS team ran a three-way A/B test.
They split earners who hadn’t yet shared their credential into three groups:
The student email drove more LinkedIn shares, but not enough to justify an IT project that would’ve delayed the campaign rollout. So ECE stuck with the more generic email, with both sample LinkedIn posts worked in.
Per Ben, “I’m glad that we were able to do that A/B test. Actually getting the data and confirming what we thought was really valuable.”
“We saw a ton more posts on LinkedIn, which was encouraging and exciting, since that’s the platform that we’d always assumed was more of the target for our audience and the place we were hoping and expecting people would use.”
Ben Iberle, Information Systems Specialist
Within a few months of launching the new email campaign, landing page, and blog, LinkedIn badge sharing (feed posts and profile adds) more than doubled, growing from 9% to 21%. Overall digital credential share rate climbed from 79% to 87%.
“We saw a ton more posts on LinkedIn, which was encouraging and exciting, since that’s the platform that we’d always assumed was more of the target for our audience and the place we were hoping and expecting people would use,” Ben shares.
Beyond the impressive marketing results they’ve seen so far, it’s the emotional impact of sharing that’s kept the team motivated.
“It’s why I really like working here,” says Nickie. “People are just so grateful to be able to show off their education and say to employers or academic institutions, ‘Hey, here’s my ECE report.’ It makes a huge impact.”
Want your earners to share their credentials, too? Chat with our Professional Services team to form a game plan.
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Accredible is the world’s leading digital credential platform, enabling education and training leaders to increase learner engagement and drive program growth.
Accredible is the world’s leading digital credential platform, enabling education and training leaders to increase learner engagement and drive program growth.
