They are two unrelated things, and only one of them is awarded by anybody. The blue tick is verification by the UNI team. The shield is domain verification, which is not awarded at all: it is worked out from scratch every time the page loads, by comparing the email address of the member who created the organization against the organization's own website.
The shield is a match, not a status
UNI takes the domain from the organization's website field, drops a leading "www.", and compares it to the part after the @ in the creator's email address. If the two are identical, the shield appears. Hover it and it reads "Domain verified".
Five things follow from that.
- It can vanish on its own. Change the website, or change the creating member's email address, and the shield goes with it. Nobody took it away.
- A subdomain does not match. A website at arch.example.edu and an email at example.edu are different strings, so there is no shield.
- Only the creator's email is compared. It makes no difference how many of your members hold institutional addresses.
- A free email address will never match. An organization created from a Gmail or Outlook account cannot carry a shield, whatever its website says.
- There is nothing to apply for. Set the website field to the domain the creating account's email uses, and it appears by itself.
The tick is applied by UNI
The blue tick means the organization's status is Verified, and only the UNI team can set it. There is no request form and no self-service route anywhere on the platform. Every other organization sits at Unverified, which is the ordinary state and is not a mark against it.
A third thing, also called domain verification
Organization settings carry their own domain verification, confirmed by a token emailed to an address at that domain. That one exists for auto-enrolment: once a domain is confirmed there, anyone who signs up with an email at that domain becomes a member of the organization automatically, and (since 2026-08-19) everyone who already had an account on that domain before verification completed is backfilled in as a member too. It produces neither the tick nor the shield, and almost no organization has set it up. See Why you are following an organization you joined.
A tick on a person is different again
The tick beside a member's name is a separate mechanism, and neither tick has anything to do with confirming your email address. See The verified badge is not email confirmation.