Your members. Your standard. Your IP.
Professional societies are the right bodies to define what competent AI practice looks like in their field. Building and running the credential program underneath that standard is a different job — and it shouldn't cost you ownership of your own intellectual property.
We build and operate the pathway. The competency standard, the curriculum, and the credential stay inside your 501(c).
The authority is yours. The infrastructure is the problem.
Your members are asking what competent AI practice looks like in your field, and no one is better placed to answer than you. But turning that answer into a credential means assessment design, item banks, practical exam environments, proctoring, badging, verification, and an annual refresh cycle — a standing operation most societies don't want to staff and can't justify building from scratch.
The usual alternatives are worse. Platform vendors want your content on their terms. Co-branding deals quietly subordinate your name. And commercial training providers end up owning the curriculum your members' dues paid to develop.
Our position is simple.
You are the authority. We are the operator. Authority isn't transferable — and we don't ask you to transfer it. If you already publish competency recommendations, we extend them rather than replace them; an individual credential sits beside your program accreditation, not over it. Everything we build for you vests in you.
What you keep, what we do
The line is drawn so that everything defining your authority stays with you, and everything operational sits with us.
| Your society | ForEvidence | |
|---|---|---|
| Competency standard | Authors and owns it outright | Advises on structure and standards alignment |
| Curriculum & content IP | Owns copyright; content vests in the society on creation | Develops it as work made for hire; holds no residual claim |
| Assessment items | Owns the item bank | Writes, validates, and maintains items on your behalf |
| The credential | Grants it; holds the accreditation and the mark | Never issues credentials in our own name |
| Brand | Primary and, if you prefer, exclusive | Operates under your brand — white-label by default |
| Candidate data | Controller; your policies govern | Processor, under your instruction and agreement |
| Delivery platform | Sets requirements and quality bar | Builds, hosts, and operates it |
| Exit | Leaves with content, items, and data in portable form | Supports transition; no hostage clauses |
Your IP stays inside your 501(c)
Written into the agreement, not just the relationship.
Work made for hire
Content and assessment items we develop for you vest in the society on creation. There is no period during which we own your curriculum.
Core vs. overlay
Your society retains the core competency framework and curriculum. Where we contribute reusable tooling or method overlays, we license those to you — never the reverse.
Narrow operating licence
We take only the limited, revocable licence needed to run the program on your behalf. It ends when the engagement does.
No claim on your marks
Your name, credential mark, and badge designs remain yours. We don't co-brand unless you want us to.
Portability guaranteed
Content, item banks, candidate records, and issuance data are exportable in open formats at any time — not just at termination.
Open primitives
Competencies are defined against open standards, so your credential never depends on our tooling — or any vendor's.
Designed around your exempt status, not against it
A credential program touches your tax status, your liability exposure, and your governance in ways a normal vendor engagement doesn't. We design for those constraints from the first conversation, and we expect your counsel in the room.
- Unrelated business income. Education and credentialing revenue structured to sit squarely within your exempt educational purpose; enterprise and bulk-licensing channels flagged early for tax review rather than discovered later.
- Implied warranty exposure. Badge and credential language framed as competency assessed, not fitness for practice — the distinction that keeps a credential from reading as a guarantee about a member's work.
- Conflict-of-interest firewall. If your society also authors standards that others accredit against, we help separate competency authorship from education revenue, and document the separation.
- Sponsor influence. Sponsor and vendor capital admitted only downstream of methodology — labs, scholarships, convenings — never curriculum or exam design.
- No private inurement. Our fees are for services rendered at arm's length. We hold no equity, revenue share of your mission income, or ongoing claim on program surplus.
We're not your tax or legal advisers — these are design constraints we build around, and your counsel signs off on the structure.
Why societies choose this
- Launch in a cycle, not a decade — no capital build, no new department
- Assessment rigor you can't easily staff — practical exams, not quizzes
- Mission control retained — your standard, your brand, your IP
- Durable to change — anchored to open standards, refreshed annually
- Reversible — you can take it in-house whenever you're ready
A stackable route, shaped to your field
We don't arrive with a fixed ladder. How many steps there are, what each is called, and where the assessment bar sits are yours to set — they depend on your members' entry points, your CE/CME obligations, and what your accreditors already recognize.
What we bring is the design discipline behind stackable credentialing: making each step independently meaningful, ensuring the steps genuinely accumulate rather than merely sit alongside one another, and matching the rigor of the assessment to the strength of what each step claims about a person.
In practice that usually means shorter, focused steps for members who need one specific competence, and a culminating designation for those taking on formal oversight responsibility — with assessment becoming progressively more demanding as the claim gets stronger.
Design principles we hold to
- Members can enter at more than one point
- Every step is independently verifiable on its own
- Steps accumulate toward a higher designation
- Assessment rigor scales with the strength of the claim
- Credit and CE/CME recognition can attach at any step
- The whole route maps to your domains and to accreditor frameworks
Four phases, and you can stop after any of them
Blueprint
We map your competency framework to recognized standards and design the assessment architecture. You end this phase owning a blueprint you could hand to anyone.
Build
Curriculum, item banks, and the practical-exam environments — developed as work for hire, vesting in you.
Launch
Pilot cohort, psychometric review, standard setting, and issuance under your brand.
Operate & refresh
Delivery, proctoring, verification, and the annual content refresh that keeps AI material from going stale.
Built on Evidentia
Your pathway runs on Evidentia — our assessment infrastructure for credential programs: evaluation harnesses, guardrail labs, observability dashboards, and a public, checkable credential register.
The model follows LEED: one body authors the standard, a separate operator administers the credential.
See the Evidentia modelHave a standard? Let's give it a pathway.
Tell us about your field and your members, and we'll sketch what a credential pathway could look like — and exactly how the IP and structure would work.