MJB Management runs the show for some of the coolest associations out there: the ones whose members spend their days treating dogs, cats, horses, reptiles, and the occasional hedgehog.
Marisa Hackemann founded MJB in 2020, drawing on decades of experience in the veterinary association niche. Over the past six years, MJB has become the go-to consultancy for clients such as the American Board of Veterinary Practitioners (ABVP®), the Association of Exotic Mammal Veterinarians (AEMV), and the Association of Reptile and Amphibian Veterinarians (ARAV), helping them manage everything from marketing and IT to finance and member certifications.
The ABVP is a particularly active board certifying organization and hosts one of the country’s premier symposiums, where members can participate in hands-on workshops and seminars to earn continuing education credits. After two years of muscling through a month-long, post-event CE issuance process, MJB decided to explore a new digital credentialing solution.
Fast forward to the 2026 symposium, Marisa and her team used Accredible and event software partner Validar to issue over 700 credentials for ABVP in a matter of days. They have plans to run the same process at the 2027 symposium — and bring their credentialing playbook to other clients, including the AEMV and the ARAV, on their combined conference Exotic365.
Credentials issued
Credential share rate
Hours saved
Marisa had already been involved in ABVP's annual symposium for fifteen years through various other organizations. That institutional knowledge served her well in managing the conference logistics and day-to-day operations. But issuing continuing ed credits post-symposium had always been a manual slog — and the complexity only grew.
She and her team were using a combination of two systems to manage the event and continuing education credits:
Validar would push attendee activity into the event software, which was expected to provide everything needed to track CEs and issue certificates — attendee names, state licenses, license numbers, and the credits they qualified for. However, assembling and formatting that information into a final, usable report proved to be much more complex than anticipated.
“The first year, my Swoogo account rep was very kind and did a lot of manual manipulation of the system’s report before she gave it to me,” Marisa explains. “Even with that assistance, there was still considerable post-processing required before the data could be used for certificate generation.”
An ABVP board member with strong Microsoft Access skills offered to help. But it took so long (12+ hours) that she couldn’t promise she’d be up for round two the following year. Even then, it wasn’t a quick ‘upload the final list to another platform, then send out digital certificates’ type of handoff.
Instead, Marisa had to use a Google add-on to personalize each PDF and send it via email. “It was incredibly stressful because the data was such a mess,” Marisa laments.
In all, it took at least a month to turn around continuing ed certificates. Corrections took even longer.
After two years of this painstaking process, Marisa knew something had to give. "Time is money," she reasoned. "And considering it was taking my team and me 40 to 60 hours — plus whatever it was taking my Swoogo account rep — it just didn't make sense to keep doing it this way."
A while back, Victor Kippes, CEO of Validar, pitched her the idea of integrating with Accredible. At the time, she was skeptical, not sure if it would yield enough of a return to pitch it to her clients.
But at this point, she was desperate and booked a demo call. The Accredible account executive came prepared, ready to walk through Marisa’s spreadsheet and mail merge workflow and point out where Accredible could make things more efficient.
Confident they could work closely with Validar to test the integration in time for ABVP’s 2026 Symposium, the team included language in the contract so that MJB would not be invoiced until Marisa saw certificates going out correctly. “I immensely appreciated Accredible’s flexibility and willingness to work with me on that,” she noted.
With the contract signed, it was time to build. From day one, Marisa saw a difference in:
In the veterinary industry, you’re required to list the attendee’s name, every state they’re licensed to practice in (which can be 15+), their license number, the names of the sessions they attended, the number of CE hours per session, and the corresponding symposium date on every continuing ed credential — a whole lot to fit on one certificate.
“Not to mention, course titles and sessions are often packed with scientific names,” Marisa notes.
Emily, MJB’s Accredible Implementation Manager, came up with the idea of issuing a credential letter. That way, the digital certificate itself would only need to list session titles and CE credits.
To maintain consistency, all certificates and credential letters would use ABVP’s brand colors and logos. “That was a good compromise, and I was really pleased and thankful Accredible put in that extra effort,” says Marisa.
With design locked in, Accredible collaborated closely with Validar to ensure a seamless event-to-credential workflow. Accredible created 95 custom attribute fields so that Validar could push all relevant attendance data (name, email, sessions, CE credits, license numbers) straight to Accredible via API post-event.
Once that data flowed in, Accredible would automatically issue credentials to the right person with the right information — no need for Marisa or her team to clean up and upload any separate dataset. And if a recipient hadn’t opened their credentials within 7 days, they got a follow-up email reminder to open and share them.
“It was like going from the dark into the light,” Marisa emphasizes. “The amount of stress on my team and me was reduced exponentially with Accredible. I would imagine that for the totality of the event, it saved approximately 60 hours of work in total.”
Plus, recipients got their certificates way faster — the very next day. As a result of the tight integration, Marisa also received “exponentially fewer” correction requests. When one did come in, the fix was quick. Pull up the person’s profile → edit the credential → click save.
“Because it’s the same credential URL they view each time, recipients don’t have to worry about having outdated documents sitting in their inbox and accidentally using them to report to their state licensing boards,” she points out.
Veterinary continuing education has its own regulatory body, RACE (Registry of Approved Continuing Education), and credits must be reported in a very specific format.
Before, that was a whole other manual project for Marisa.
“Now, I can just export all that data from Accredible and copy/paste it into RACE’s template,” Marisa shares. “Time is the most valuable thing we have in life, and to get so much of it back is priceless.”
One unexpected pro of using Accredible was that it made it easy for recipients to share their credentials online and with their professional networks.
After certificates went out, over half of symposium attendees opened them right away, and 50%+ shared their credentials on LinkedIn (in their newsfeed and/or added to their "Licenses & Certifications" section) — demonstrating their excitement and amplifying ABVP’s brand awareness.
“Historically, I had no reference point for whether anybody was doing anything with their certificate other than just saving it in their inbox,” Marisa says. “Getting ABVP and the symposium that visibility on LinkedIn was a nice bonus that honestly wasn’t on my radar.”
And unlike a PDF that lives in an inbox and can't be authenticated, each Accredible credential has a permanent, verifiable URL. With one click, you can see who earned it, when, and what the credential covers.
For ABVP Diplomates working toward a ten-year Maintenance of Certification, that's a record they can display on their profiles, share with licensing boards, and carry with them throughout their careers.
The 2026 ABVP symposium was the proof of concept for the Accredible-Validar integration, and it delivered. Marisa is already finding other ways to leverage Accredible.
For example, ABVP recently decided to launch its own official journal. The team came to Marisa asking for CE credits for the article reviewers. “I immediately thought, ‘There had to be a way for me to do this in Accredible,’” Marisa explains. “So I started working with our Accredible rep, Emily, explained what I needed, and she said, 'Yep, gotcha covered — people use it like that all the time.'"
She also plans to use the Accredible-Validar integration to issue digital and verifiable CE certificates for AEMV and ARAV at their combined conference, Exotic365.
After two years of dreading post-event credential season, Marisa is the first to admit that how smoothly things went with Accredible and Validar caught her off guard:
“I have a healthy distrust of all technology and data systems, so I wasn’t sure this was going to happen the way it needed to happen. But I was very pleasantly surprised when it all came together on time, as promised, and worked even better than I hoped it would."
Managing an association with continuing ed credits to issue? Book a demo to see how Accredible can take credential issuance off your plate and turn your credentials into records your members can carry with them throughout their careers.
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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.
