A rating that only exists inside one platform is worth something to the platform and much less to you.
Referral cards are the fix. When a brand rates a delivered booking, that rating mints a shareable, brand-branded credential at its own link — one you can send to anyone, including a client who has never heard of Acumin and never will.
What's on a card
Each card is built from one rating on one booking:
- The brand's name — it's their credential about your work, not a self-description
- Your name and handle
- The star rating, overall
- The three dimensions — quality, communication and on-time — where the brand scored them
- Would rebook, as a yes or no
- Their note, in their words
- The speciality the booking was for
- The date
And, when the brand linked the live post, the content's real-world performance.
The performance figure, and its label
This is the part worth understanding properly, because it's where most portfolio claims quietly become fiction.
If the brand linked the live post after the work went out, the card can carry views and engagement. That figure is labelled by source:
Measured — Acumin fetched it from a platform it can read. YouTube today. A verification mark appears on these.
Reported — the brand typed the number in. Still useful, still shown, never marked verified.
The two are never blurred and never averaged. A reported number doesn't get a checkmark, and no amount of it turns into a measured one. That's the same measured vs reported doctrine that runs through the rest of the product, applied at the point where it matters most to you — the moment you show a client evidence.
It's worth being clear about why that's in your interest rather than a limitation. A portfolio where every number is checkable is worth more than one where the numbers are impressive and untraceable, in exactly the market where everyone's numbers are impressive and untraceable.
Where a card comes from
You can't create one. That's the point.
A card exists because a brand that booked you, received delivered work, and owns that booking left a rating. One rating per booking, one card per rating. The gating is described in why booking-gated ratings mean something.
Which means a card is evidence in a way a testimonial isn't. Anyone can write a testimonial. A card required a real engagement to have happened.
What to do with one
Send it directly. In a pitch, in a follow-up, in the email where a prospective client is deciding between you and someone else. It's a link, so it works anywhere a link works.
Attach the most relevant one, not the best one. A four-star card from a project that closely resembles what this client needs beats a five-star card from an unrelated job. Same logic as choosing what goes in a reel — relevance beats quality.
Use it where a testimonial would go. Website, portfolio, proposal. The difference is that a card can be clicked through and checked.
Lead with the rebook flag when it's a yes. "Would rebook" is the hardest thing on the card to be politely generous about, and experienced clients know that.
Getting more of them
Cards come from ratings, and ratings come from delivered bookings that brands remember to rate.
Ask, on delivery. The window when a client is happiest is the few days after a successful hand-off. A specific ask — "would you rate the booking?" — converts much better than a vague one, and it's a thirty-second job for them.
Ask them to link the live post. This is the step most brands skip, and it's the one that puts a performance figure on your card. Worth a sentence in your delivery email: "when it goes live, if you drop the link on the booking, the performance shows up on my end too."
Deliver in a way that makes rating easy. Everything in turning one booking into three applies — the rating is downstream of the experience, not of the footage.
Two honest limits
A card is one project. It's a data point, not a summary. Your Acumin Score is the aggregate view, and it's deliberately conservative about small samples.
Only work booked through Acumin can produce one. Fifteen years of excellent work elsewhere doesn't retroactively generate cards. That's a consequence of gating — the thing that makes them credible is the same thing that makes them narrow. Your portfolio still does the rest of the arguing.
Where this sits
Referral cards, the Score and your public profile are three views of the same underlying record: real bookings that completed.
The profile is where a brand browsing finds you. The score is how you rank when they're comparing. The card is what you send when you're the one doing the reaching out — and it's the only one of the three that works entirely off-platform.
That last property is the whole design intent. Proof that only functions inside the marketplace that issued it isn't proof you own, and a reputation you can't take with you doesn't compound.
How to use this today
Look at your delivered bookings and find any that haven't been rated. Send a short note to each of those clients asking for one — it takes them a minute and it's the only way a card gets made.
For the cards you already have, pick the one that best matches the kind of work you want more of, and put its link in your pitch template.
Related: Understanding your Acumin Score is the aggregate these roll into. Building a reputation that compounds is why portability is the property that matters.