World Education Servies
WES
_SECTOR: SOCIAL JUSTICESince 1974, World Education Services (WES) has set the standard for international academic credential evaluation, helping immigrants, international students, and refugees thrive in the U.S. and Canada. In recent years, WES has embraced a social enterprise model, expanding its social impact efforts in response to evolving attitudes toward immigration. As they prepared for their 50th anniversary in 2024, they were eager to communicate their new approach and tie together the many facets of their work.
With rigorous research, in-depth analysis, and dynamic group workshops, Emergence assisted WES in communicating its organizational value proposition. The result: impactful messaging assets and a cohesive blog strategy that articulate WES's voice with clarity, precision, and purpose.
Research | Copywriting | Strategy | Messaging | UX/UI_THE CHALLENGE
WES is a trailblazer in credential evaluation and immigrant services, bridging global gaps in education, employment, and credential recognition. To tackle entrenched systemic barriers, WES transitioned to a social enterprise model, creating a sustainable financial ecosystem that reinvests directly into the community. However, their social impact work was siloed from their other areas of work, limiting their collective visibility.
Our mission was to help WES communicate their unwavering dedication to advancing educational equity, championing inclusive labor markets, and empowering immigrant success through a social impact blog. By amplifying their transformative mission on a systemic scale, WES aims to serve as a powerful example for similar organizations to follow.
_SEARCHING FOR THE SIGNAL
Through our review of WES’s communications and discussions with senior leaders, we identified a key challenge: the breadth of the organization’s work had led to fragmented messaging. Each social impact division — credential evaluation, philanthropic funding, policy, and programming — maintained its own blog, resulting in a disjointed user experience.
To address this, Emergence conducted a comprehensive content analysis of WES’s blogs and messaging, combined with stakeholder interviews and collaborative workshops on language and tone, to unify their social impact divisions under a cohesive communications strategy.
_EMERGENCE
We introduced a unified blog strategy and crafted compelling messaging documents that embodied WES’s bold vision and renewed priorities, laying the groundwork for powerful, cohesive communication.
The new blog strategy for the WES website streamlined the content and amplified their dedication to social impact and a social enterprise model. This allowed for improved UX/UI for readers, a simpler structure for content categorization, and alignment on posts’ substance, tone, frequency, and quality so that the blog could effectively reach the diverse audiences and geographies WES communicates with.
_EVOLUTION
The message documents we created ensured that across the board, WES’s different functions and internal stakeholders were speaking from a strong, shared narrative that could reach people far and wide.
Building on this new ethos, Emergence shifted focus to blog strategy implementation with a series of workshops with WES blog writers to train them on tone of voice, content architecture, and format.
WES’s Social Impact blog launched in 2024, clarifying their organizational strategy of creating innovative programs, promoting supportive public policies, making targeted investments, and facilitating impactful grantmaking.
