MIT Professional Education is a leader in technology and engineering education for working professionals globally pursuing career advancement, and for organizations seeking to meet modern-day challenges by expanding the knowledge and skills of their employees. Programs are delivered in a range of formats—in-person (on-campus and live virtual), online, and through blended approaches, to meet the needs of today's learners.
And it's gaining the traction it deserves through Accredible. In the past 12 months, they've enrolled 24,000 participants across 155 countries and issued over 75,000 digital certificates to date — reengaging those who have completed their programs and catching the eye of potential new learners through the marketing channels that really matter.
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When you take a course at MIT Professional Education, you're joining a community — a community you’ll be a part of for the rest of your life. As the Assistant Director of Marketing and Business Development at MIT Professional Education, Myriam Joseph saw digital issuance of certificates through Accredible as a tremendous opportunity to support and amplify MIT Professional Education’s exceptional network.
“We wanted to make sure that this community of like-minded people is something we value, our learners value, and it was critical that marketing support that message.”
But to effectively spread that message, MIT Professional Education certificates had to be accessible and easy for learners to use and share on social media. They also had to look and feel consistent — regardless of the courses learners attended — and simple for MIT Professional Education program team to issue. Creating shareable PDFs, printing physical certificates, and getting all the necessary signatures limited the time the team had to spend on strategic tasks.
The team needed a digital credentialing solution, but not any tool would do. They wanted a reputable partner who could support their nearly 200 courses and programs and any new ones they add in the future, providing expert guidance along the way.
“To be successful with your credentialing program, you need a partner who will be right there with you along the way, thinking in terms of your goals and KPIs throughout implementation, post-implementation, and optimization. With Accredible, we have that kind of partnership.”
Myriam Joseph, Assistant Director of Marketing and Business Development, MIT Professional Education
Myriam and the marketing team as well as the program team kept hearing about Accredible from peers, so they decided to put it on their evaluation list. It quickly stood out among competitors.
Accredible’s reputation, ability to issue both digital certificates and badges, and excellent Customer Success and Professional Services teams were big deciding factors, helping to ensure Myriam and her team maximized the platform’s ROI.
Myriam says, “We wanted a reputable partner we could see ourselves grow with. Right now, we're only issuing certificates. But if we want to do badges and other offerings, we wanted a platform that had the capacity to do so and a team that could really help us.”
Accredible also gave admins the ability to send multiple email follow-ups after issuing credentials. “This was critical for us,” Myriam notes. “We wanted to remind learners of the benefits of their experience, let them know about additional discounts for future courses, and share ways they can stay in contact with their new community at MIT Professional Education.”
Accredible’s intuitive user interface was a boon, too. Issuing credentials would be a quick and easy process for the MIT Professional Education team. For learners, accessing and sharing their credentials would be a breeze with Accredible’s One-Click Sharing. And Accredible’s real-time analytics would monitor shares and downloads (among many other insights), allowing Myriam and her team to follow up with the learners who hadn’t yet opened their certificates and engage with the ones who had on social media.
To harness the power of community and social sharing, Myriam knew that the program’s digital certificates — and the whole learner experience surrounding them — had to be on brand.
“Accredible is part of the family of applications that we use, so we had to make sure that it was well integrated in terms of branding,” she says. “By essentially white-labeling it, learners have a seamless experience, and our certificates carry our brand forward, making learners feel proud to receive and share them.”
Next, she focused on analytics, pulling Accredible platform data into their marketing tech stack. This way, she and her team could accurately attribute net-new learners to their credential-sharing efforts on social media: “We are recording all the activities our social team is doing and who our top engaged learners are. We pull all that data into Salesforce, so we're able to easily track our progress and its resulting contributions to the lead pipeline.”
After the initial launch, Myriam partnered with Accredible’s Professional Services team to elevate its certificate program and strategize ways to increase learner engagement and credential-sharing. Together, they refined credential delivery emails to fit MIT Professional Education’s objectives and pushed learners to share their accomplishments with their LinkedIn networks.
She explains, “If you admire someone and you see they just completed a certificate that everyone is raving about on social, you're going to want to know more. We looked at the credential email journeys to see what type of emails really worked — not just the messaging but the look and feel. We also looked at testing the timing of the flow of emails.”
In A/B tests, these tweaks resulted in a notable 7% increase in learners adding certificates to their LinkedIn profiles — reflecting enhanced engagement with MIT Professional Education’s digital credentials on social platforms and, ultimately, more interest in the program.
Though these email adjustments were initially highly manual, Accredible has since launched Email Campaigns, a suite of learner engagement marketing capabilities designed to boost credential engagement, increase renewals, or market additional courses.
MIT Professional Education certificate earners are proud of their accomplishments and want to share in the joy of completing their program. Myriam saw social sharing as a way to extend the relationship with learners and congratulate them on a job well done.
“When learners share their certificate, it’s saying to the world, ‘I valued learning from MIT faculty and worked hard to gain this knowledge.’ We want to rally around that, saying how proud we are of them,” Myriam explains.
So she and her social media team devised a strategy for liking and commenting on learner LinkedIn posts and even got faculty to participate, leaving thoughtful, specific comments about the learners they had in class. Taking this approach has not only made learners feel valued but also piqued other people’s interest, pushing them to explore what MIT Professional Education has to offer and ultimately increasing enrollment.
In an average week, Myriam and her team engage with between 50 to 100 learners on social, getting in front of thousands more potential learners.
A consistent focus on learner engagement and optimization has paid off. Since its launch, credential open rate has increased to 90%, credential share rate to 92%, and LinkedIn share rate to 76%. Even more impressive is that, in the past 12 months, the program hit a 127% credential referral rate, meaning that for every credential shared online, 1.27 referrals come to MIT Professional Education pages.
“Since we've started using Recommendations, we’ve seen a lot more learners who earned credentials take additional courses. When we started, we had around 35% of learners return, but now we’re over 50% taking additional courses.”
Myriam Joseph, Assistant Director of Marketing and Business Development, MIT Professional Education
The end of one course at MIT Professional Education shouldn’t be the end of the road — it should open the door to new and exciting opportunities. To surface those opportunities, Myriam and her team reviewed each of MIT Professional Education’s top 50 courses and came up with a list of the next-best courses for learners to take.
They included these suggestions in each credential delivery email, pointing learners in the right direction. “As soon as we did that, we immediately saw a spike in engagement,” she says.
A few months later, Accredible’s Recommendations engine launched. Myriam and her team immediately took advantage. Using Recommendations, MIT Professional Education advertises its courses on credential pages (its own and other issuers’ pages) and prominently at the top of CourseFinder, a credential directory and course search platform. In doing so, MIT Professional Education can better market its courses to new and existing learners, generating additional program enrollment and revenue.
“Re-engagement journeys are complicated enough as-is. Recommendations was an easy add for us and it was appreciated by our learners — they were craving guidance for what’s next,” Myriam emphasizes. “We even went a step further with this by sponsoring certain courses so they are recommended more often. They’re basically serving ads to folks who might be interested in certain topics, encouraging them to take a look at MIT Professional Education.”
Since launching Recommendations, MIT Professional Education has generated over 5 million impressions with current and future learners — generating over 18,500 additional program referrals.
MIT Professional Education is setting an example for its learners by constantly evolving its program and staying up-to-date with the latest and greatest digital credential technology.
Myriam and her team explore each new Accredible feature as it’s released, and they continue to lean on the Professional Services team to make the most of their investment in Accredible and create the best possible experience for MIT Professional Education learners.
“We know that a certificate program is not a one-and-done thing, so it’s been great to work with Accredible to identify areas we can level up,” Myriam shares. “We’re periodically revisiting and reevaluating, understanding what's new and coming up and how we can leverage those tools in an efficient way.”
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Accredible is the world’s leading digital credential platform, enabling education and training leaders to increase learner engagement and drive program growth.
Accredible is the world’s leading digital credential platform, enabling education and training leaders to increase learner engagement and drive program growth.
