9. 9
The Promotional Value
of Digital Credentials
An IBM Case Study
Jim Daniels – Sr. Pgrm Director IBM Digital Credential Strategy
October 23, 2019
10. Incorporating digital badging into promotional strategy requires
understanding stakeholder needs
• Broadcast achievements
• Motivate participation
• Develop personal brand
• Connect with jobs
• Generate qualified leads
• Enhance our brand
• Differentiate IBM
• Track and nurture talent
• Candidate selection
• Improved company
performance
• Skills maps
• Team building
11. Marketing plays a key role when defining digital badge program objectives
Reduce customer
service and support
Increase client
confidence
Map skills at a
discreet level
Build a loyal skill base
who want more
Enhance expertise
analytics
Promote Technical
Eminence
Crowd-source
innovation
Recognize employees
for achievement
Acquire verified
talent
Drive
membership
Achieve career
milestone
Accelerate shifts in
expertise
12. We developed badging use cases and desired benefits to help tune our marketing and
promotional efforts
14. https://www.ibm.com/volunteers
Over 8,000 badges issued to IBM
Volunteers around the globe
since March 2018!
Provides IBM employees a way
to give back while developing
professionally
Badges help enhance your
organization’s brand by raising
visibility within local
communities
15. Over 8,000 badges issued to IBM
Volunteers around the globe!
Provides IBM employees a way
to give back while developing
professionally
Badges help enhance your
organization’s brand by raising
visibility within local
communities
https://cognitiveclass.ai/
Promote your badged
programs with social media
links
16.
17. Badges issued to recognize key
learning milestones within
structured learning pathways
help promote IBM education
services and alternative
credential programs
Badges increase awareness,
engagement and recognition
for IBM’s corporate social
responsibility initiatives
Badge social media impact can add value to any program
18. Recognition of community,
organization and association
member contributions create
greater visibility across your
markets and target audiences
‘Champion’ recognition
programs drive awareness,
advocacy and promotion of
products and services
Badge social media impact can add value to any program
19. Social media promotion has led to many noteworthy successes across IBM’s
diverse portfolio of badged programs
Improved ability to crowd-source
technical content authorship for
IBM’s flagship technical
publication program
Digital badges impact
129%
Increase in student enrollments
226%
increase in course completion
IBM Enterprise DesignThinking
program has trained and badged over
180,000 Design Thinking Practitioners
around the globe
3X increase in membership
within six months of launching
Membership and Advocacy
badges
IBM Garage
IBM Badge SharingTrends on Social Media
Jan 01 – Jun 30 2019
20. IBM DIGITAL BADGE PROGRAM
BY THE NUMBERS
146 / 195
Countries
2691 / 848
Badged activities
1.9M / 1.1M
Badges issued
91% / 94%
Badge claim rate
217M / 306M
Social media impressions
■ Overall Program
■ IBMer Only
Sep 30, 2019
Our ecosystem has overwhelmingly embraced Digital Credentials!
2.3M / 3.4M
Badge Views
$10M*
In social media marketing value
generated by IBM badges
21. Social Media MarketingValue Analysis
1.2M
Number of earned IBM badges shared to social media:
306M
Number of social media impressions generated by IBM badges
(based on an aggregated average of 300 connections across all social media channels per badge earner)
$5.00
Conservative Cost PerThousand Impressions (CPM)
$1.5M
Social media CPM $ value generated for the IBM brand
3.4M
Number of IBM shared badge views on Acclaim (click-thru)
$2.50
Conservative Cost Per Click (CPC) for typical LinkedIn paid ad campaign
$8.5M
Social media CPC $ value generated for the IBM brand
Jan 2016 – Sep 2019
22. Other ways to leverage badges for promotional purposes
Publish Articles Promote withVideos Organic Benefits
24. Supporting Our Brand Through
Digital Badges
Carey Blakeman – Senior Manager, Portfolio Strategy and
Management
25. How we started
• Future of learning study
• Expanded our certificate offering to two areas – auditing employee
benefit plans and auditing single audits
• Released first two exam-based certificates in April 2016
• Received digital badge instead of paper certificate
Future of Learning
report - 2013
EAQ initiative - 2014
Department of
Labor’s audit quality
study - 2015
AICPA’s first digital
badge, released as a
certificate - 2016
26. Immediate marketing: resources available for
promotion
• Webpage on the AICPA’s .org site
• Dedicated marketing webpage for these certificates
• Tied certificates to the EAQ initiative
• Both communications and marketing were involved
Example wording:
AICPA’s digital badge
page
27. What we learned
• Marketing flyers and content was too product
focused; not encompassing of product and badge
as one
• Higher acceptance and engagement activity rates
when release badge along with product/resource,
rather than retroactively issue
28. Rebrand opportunity
In 2017, the AICPA and CIMA
created a joint venture, the
Association of International
Certified Professional
Accountants (AICPA &CIMA)
New brand underway
Badge framework changed
31. What we learned
• Changing images often is confusing
• Have communication plan in place before
changing images
32. Increased badge offerings
Met demand of audience
Broadened topical areas to emerging technology
affecting finance and accounting professionals
Marketing created dedicated certificate landing page
and enhanced marketing around digital badges
Expanded to international membership
33. Badge statistics
Year of issuance 2016 2017 2018 2019 Total
New resource 6 4 15 13 38
Existing resource 2 2 6 2 12
Total 8 6 21 15 50
• Ove 11,000 badges have been issued
• Prior to migration
– Over 1.8 million badge page views
– Average ~62% acceptance rate
