Understanding what happens after a badge is issued has always been one of the biggest gaps in credentialing.
You could see activity across badge creation, awarding, and sharing. But it was still difficult to answer critical questions:
- Are learners actually accepting badges?
- Are those badges being seen after they’re shared?
- Which credentials are truly driving engagement and visibility?
This is what this release begins to change.
We’re introducing a new Analytics experience in Parchment Digital Badges, starting with post award badge analytics. For the first time, you can track badge acceptance and views alongside sharing, supported by engagement metrics, distribution insights, and performance comparisons.
This is the first step in a phased rollout that will continue to expand, giving you deeper visibility into performance drivers and a complete view of the badge lifecycle over time.
What’s Happening
For a long time, analytics in Parchment Digital Badges helped answer part of the story:
Existing analytics provided visibility into activity, but not the full picture of what happens after a badge is issued.
But key questions remained:
- Are learners actually accepting badges?
- Are those badges being seen after they’re shared?
- Which badges are truly performing, not just being issued?
Most importantly, it didn’t help you answer:
“What should we do differently?”
That’s the gap we’re solving.
What’s Changing
We are introducing a dedicated Analytics workspace that brings together performance metrics, distribution insights, and badge-level performance rankings into a single, consistent view.
This is not a single release, but a phased rollout. Each phase builds on the previous one. Starting with visibility into post award engagement, and expanding into performance drivers and full lifecycle insights.
Release I: Foundation – Post Award Badge Analytics (Beta: April 13, 2026 | Production: April 27, 2026)
This first release introduces post award badge analytics, giving you a clear, usable picture of how badges are accepted, shared, and viewed.
It combines three perspectives that are now available together for the first time:
Performance Overview
You can now track:
- Badge awards
- Badge acceptance (new)
- Badge sharing
- Badge views (new)
These are supported by:
- Learner Engagement Score
- External Impact Score
- Trend indicators to show how metrics change over time
This helps you understand how learners interact with badges after they are issued.
Distribution Insights
You can now see how badges move through the ecosystem:
- How they are awarded (manual, LMS, API, etc.)
- How they are shared (LinkedIn, link copy, embed, etc.)
- Where they are viewed
This adds important context to performance by showing how engagement actually happens.
Top Performing Badges
You can now clearly see which badges are driving the strongest engagement and reach.
This makes it easier to:
- Compare badge performance
- Identify successful patterns
- Focus on what is working
- Replicate successful badge strategies across your programs
This helps shift focus from volume to performance, highlighting which credentials are actually delivering results.
Together, these views give you a connected understanding of performance, behavior, and outcomes in one place.
What this means in practice
Instead of looking at separate data points, you can now:
- See how badges are performing
- Understand how they are being used
- Identify which ones are driving the strongest results
Together, these views allow you to connect performance with behavior and identify what is actually driving results.
This is the foundation for making more informed decisions about your credential programs.
Release II: Understanding Performance Drivers (Coming May 2026)
The next phase builds on this foundation by helping you understand which characteristics of your badges contribute most to engagement and external visibility.
It compares badges with different attributes such as:
- alignment with skills
- inclusion in courses or pathways
- presence in catalogs or collections
By comparing badges with and without these attributes, you can clearly see which structures are associated with stronger engagement and visibility.
Key insights highlight the factors that have the greatest impact on learner engagement and external reach, helping institutions optimize how badges are designed and delivered.
Release III: Lifecycle and Trends (Coming May 2026)
The final phase completes the analytics experience by introducing a full lifecycle view of badge engagement, combined with trend analysis over time.
You will be able to track how badges progress across each stage:
Awarded → Accepted → Shared → Viewed
This makes it possible to clearly see where engagement is strong and where it drops off.
In addition to the lifecycle view, you will be able to analyze how performance evolves over time. Instead of looking at static numbers, you can track when engagement happens, how it changes across different periods, and how program updates impact results.
Together, these capabilities help you move beyond understanding what is happening, to identifying where to focus:
- Improving acceptance rates through better communication or timing
- Increasing sharing through stronger calls to action
- Optimizing visibility by focusing on high-performing channels
A Complete Analytics Experience
Beyond the core analytics views, this release introduces capabilities that make these insights actionable across your organization.
Scoped Analytics Views
Analytics are available at multiple levels:
- Organization level (full view for admins)
- Issuer level (automatically scoped to a single issuer)
- Badge level (focused on a specific badge class)
This means every user sees relevant, contextual insights without requiring manual filtering or setup.
Centralized Exports and Data Access
All analytics data can be exported directly from the platform in multiple formats, including CSV and image formats for reporting.
For more advanced use cases, API access allows you to:
- Integrate badge performance data into institutional reporting workflows
- Combine badge data with other institutional data
- Automate reporting workflows
How to Get Started
When the new Analytics workspace becomes available, the easiest way to start is to focus on three simple questions:
1. What is working?
Start with the Top Performing Badges table.
Look at which badges have the strongest combination of engagement and reach.
2. How is it working?
Use the Distribution Insights to understand how those badges are being:
This helps you identify which channels and methods are driving visibility.
3. Is it improving over time?
Use the performance metrics and trend indicators to track:
- Engagement changes
- Share behavior
- Visibility growth
This gives you a quick read on whether your program is moving in the right direction.
What to Expect
As you start using the new Analytics experience, there are a few important things to keep in mind:
- Acceptance and views are newly introduced metrics, so historical data may appear lower at first
- KPI tiles reflect overall values, while trend indicators reflect changes within your selected timeframe
- KPI tiles are not affected by filters and always display all-time values
- Distribution data may include broader categories (such as “Other”) for historical activity that was not previously tracked in detail
These will stabilize over time as more data is collected.
Why This Matters
This update changes how you evaluate your badge programs.
Instead of relying on activity alone, you can now:
- Understand how learners interact with badges after they are issued
- See how badges reach external audiences
- Identify which credentials are driving meaningful engagement
This allows you to move from tracking activity to making informed decisions about how to improve your programs.
Closing
The first release of the Analytics experience will be available in Beta starting April 13, and in Production starting April 27 2026.
This is the first step toward a more complete, data-driven way to understand and improve your badge programs.
This is the first step toward a more complete, data-driven way to understand and improve your badge programs, and we look forward to seeing how you use it.
The Parchment Digital Badges Team
