Case Study | 
The Great Books Foundation

How Accredible Increased Brand Visibility for a Nationally-Recognized Professional Development Organization

The Organization

The Great Books Foundation is an independent, nonprofit educational organization that develops reading and discussion programs for students, teachers, and adult learners. For over 75 years, the Great Books Foundation has published anthologies of authentic texts, offering a variety of print and digital solutions for the classroom in addition to professional development in the Shared Inquiry™ method of learning for teachers. With courses centered around learning, practicing, and mastering Shared Inquiry, the Great Books Foundation’s mission is to leverage literacy and critical thinking to form reflective, knowledgeable citizens equipped to participate constructively in a democratic society.

Challenges

The Great Books Foundation has long been recognized for its progression of training courses, coaching, and consultation to enable teachers to become proficient in inquiry-based teaching. But their original method of credential delivery relied heavily on manually designing and issuing paper certificates that were not easy to share widely, and thus offered little to no brand awareness. In addition, the Foundation was looking for a consistent way to incentivize and encourage learners to enroll in their series of intermediate and advanced courses, as well as asynchronous learning opportunities.

“Previously, teachers had to request their certificate. Someone within our organization would have to take that person's information and then individually design the certificate. This made the credential delivery process very laborious and took a lot of internal resources from other tasks. We needed a way to automate the recognition process for educational attainment,” said Teri Laliberte, professional learning consultant at Great Books Foundation.

The Solution

To support their program growth goals, the Great Books Foundation partnered with Accredible to launch a comprehensive digital credential solution that now offers:

  • Portability—giving teachers the option to seamlessly share their achievements online and store them all in one place for easy access
  • Built-in Marketing—allowing the Great Books Foundation to boost their brand visibility on social media and across all online channels
  • Credential Automation—eliminating the need to manually design and issue certificates, thereby freeing up key internal resources for more strategic tasks
  • Learning Incentives—motivating teachers to take multiple courses to meet their annual professional development requirements and interests
  • Data Tracking—enabling Great Books Foundation to closely monitor their learners’ journey using Accredible integration with HubSpot

Results

Great Books Foundation started with issuing the 300-level badges to their learners. This initial group was instrumental in the teachers' acceptance of the 100-level badges.

As many of their 300-level graduates added their badges to their email signatures, this encouraged other teachers to do the same, resulting in higher brand visibility online.

In just a few months, the Great Books Foundation has significantly decreased the time spent on issuing digital credentials and observed a measurable shift in how their credentials are shared and used in various ways.

“The user interface is very intuitive and issuing credentials either one at a time or in large batches has been very helpful in cutting down the time we spend on credentials. It’s been easy for me to also create the badge architecture and build out a plan for our 100-level, 200-level, and 300-level badges. We’ve recently had one district use the badges and certificates issued through Accredible as a way to track the number of teachers at the school."
Teri Laliberte, professional learning consultant at Great Books Foundation

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