An institution can use the following template to define various initiatives and establish messaging and marketing goals for incremental credentials—both individual credentials and credential pathway programs. An institution that is developing a broad strategy for incremental credentialing may have several initiatives in mind. One that is focusing its communications strategy on a single incremental credential will likely have fewer initiatives to message and market. Each initiative should include: a description of the initiative’s focus, a clearly defined goal (s), and at least one metric to measure success.
Initiative X will use blogs and other written social media content to market incremental credential(s) to our students (current, prospective, former) and their family members.
Description
| Example: Over the next 12 months, we’ll build a blog property that becomes a go-to resource for our students’/parents’ burning questions—and our main source of leads each month. |
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Define goal(s)for theinitiative
| Example: To increase our website’s rank on Google and create critical top-of-the-funnel marketing content that helps our academic team start more conversations with prospective students and parents. |
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Identify metrics to measure success
| Example: 50,000 organic page views per month / 10 content downloads per month.
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Credential As You Go has acquired three phases of funding to date. Lumina Foundation funded Phase I, resulting in the Incremental Credential Framework for testing. The Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education funds Phase II (Grant R305T210063), which focuses on rapid prototyping of and research on incremental credentials with a national campaign. An anonymous private donor fund at the Program on Skills, Credentials & Workforce Policy at George Washington University funds the development of the prototype Learn and Work Ecosystem Library. Walmart funds Phase III, which focuses on systems change for expansion and sustainability of incremental credentials. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent views of Lumina Foundation, Institute of Education Sciences, the U.S. Department of Education, Walmart, or George Washington University.
