What do a creative ops lead at a consumer packaged goods company, an art archivist at a metropolitan museum, and the person running a university’s research library have in common? They all work in digital asset management. No matter the corner of the field they work in, their day-to-day looks very different than it did even five years ago, thanks to AI and automation.
To keep their skills sharp, many professionals turn to Rutgers Continuing and Professional Studies (CPS). Five of its seven online certificates focus on digital asset management (DAM), and two cover communications: Public Affairs and Communication Strategy, and Crisis Communication and Reputation Management. Six of the seven are the only programs of their kind worldwide.
Each program includes a verifiable digital badge, delivered through Accredible, that shows current and future employers exactly what graduates have mastered. Behind that industry-leading catalog is a dedicated Rutgers CPS team, with Scott Delfino, Assistant Director, and Lilybeth Otero, a part-time Curriculum Support Assistant, driving the Accredible partnership. Both saw a chance to do more with their digital credentials and increase graduate engagement. They needed the time and resources to make it happen.
Accredible Professional Services built and ran a custom strategy to help CPS grow brand awareness, student testimonials, and enrollment. This fall, all seven programs ran, up from four last fall, and total fall enrollment rose 150% year over year.
Enrollment growth in comparable fall programs
Increase in credentials added to LinkedIn profiles
Credential share rate
“Our work with Accredible has helped us turn that moment of achievement into an opportunity for continued learning and engagement with our professional community.”
— Julie Johnson, Ed.D., Assistant Dean for Continuing and Professional Studies
While some earners were opening and sharing their digital credentials, Scott and Lilybeth had a hunch that CPS programs — and the DAM and communications fields they serve — could be getting more attention. For one thing, there was no automated way to remind folks to post about their digital badges on LinkedIn.
“So sharing would peak in the first 24 hours, and we’d get excited. But then, it would fizzle out fairly quickly,” Lilybeth recalls.
And the earners who did remember to share would tag Rutgers University, not CPS specifically. That gave CPS little brand visibility, and it made it hard for Lilybeth, Scott, and the instructors to engage with earners right after they posted or to know who to ask for testimonials.
There also wasn’t a clear path for what to do after a learner earned a credential. What coursework should they take next? What else in the CPS catalog might interest them? “If we have someone who is in the Digital Asset Management Bronze certificate, we wanted them to see other pathways, whether it’s DAM and AI or DAM for Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums (GLAM),” Scott explains.
“We wanted to re-energize and re-engage our current student base to continue working with us on one of the advanced certificates,” he adds. But Scott and Lilybeth were strapped for time, juggling marketing, enrollment management, budgets, and student grade entry.
To get their marketing flywheel going full force, CPS needed dedicated experts who knew credentialing inside and out.
“I just kept thinking, ‘How are we going to expand these numbers? How can we explode them somehow?’” Lilybeth remembers. “As soon as I found out that Accredible offered support, I was taking an initial meeting and asking things like, ‘Can you help us increase enrollment?’”
That meeting quickly turned into a full-blown partnership. The Accredible Professional Services (PS) team built a strategy to get CPS noticed, turn graduates into advocates, and encourage students to pursue their next certificate, and then ran it, step by step.
Before writing a single email, the PS team mapped every message earners already received from Accredible, CPS, and Rutgers more broadly, whether by email, on social media, or in the credential itself. This surfaced gaps where CPS could promote its programs or prompt students to share their digital credentials, plus timing clashes where earners received too many emails at once.
From there, they moved on to personas. They ran a workshop with Scott and Lilybeth to pin down who receives Rutgers credentials and why they share those badges online. Two segments emerged:
Knowing who these people are and, more importantly, what motivates them helped the PS team tailor messaging for each persona across both the DAM and communications programs. To get even more nitty-gritty details, the PS team tracked down past Rutgers “champions,” graduates who’d been featured in CPS testimonials, and dug up their real LinkedIn posts to see how they talked about their credentials in the wild — ideal examples for the campaign ahead.
Before they engaged with Professional Services, CPS was using default digital credential delivery emails. Those worked well enough to get some students sharing, but they weren’t the kind of personalized, sustained drip that would move people to action.
“The hope for these emails was to bring it back to the forefront of their mind. To have them go, ‘Oh yeah, I meant to share that on LinkedIn,’ and give them that nudge to actually do it,” says Lilybeth.
Drawing on the message mapping and personas from the research phase, the PS team built two tracks of a four-email sequence, one for DAM earners and one for communications earners:
After the CPS team offered edits for brand style and tone, the PS team finalized the sequence and set it to run on its own.
“Automating anything is a huge help for us because we do try to re-engage our alumni,” says Scott. “With this all going out on its own, we can focus on other things that we’re sending through our CRM, and the messaging all goes together. We’re reiterating that we’re here for students to continue their educational journey.”
Being intentional about what these emails said and who they went to paid off. Credentials added to LinkedIn profiles rose 1.5x, while CPS sustained an 87% credential open rate and a 100% credential share rate. Equally important, earners started tagging the Rutgers CPS account instead of Rutgers at large, putting the CPS name in front of their professional networks.
“Before, we had students going, ‘Hey, I just turned in my last assignment, where’s my badge?’ So we knew their goal was to share it with their employer or coworkers because they’re proud, as they should be,” Lilybeth points out. “But I don’t know that we expected the numbers to go up this much.”
Reminders sink in with repetition. So, on top of the emails, the PS team added custom marketing messages earners couldn’t miss, right on the digital credential page. The second an earner opened their badge, they’d see a Rutgers-branded prompt to:
“Student testimonials are always the best way to tell the story. From everything we share on LinkedIn, it’s the testimonials that really resonate with our audience,” Scott shares.
And the prompts delivered. When David Hirsch, a multi-certificate DAM graduate, tagged Rutgers CPS and thanked his instructors by name, his LinkedIn post got 62 likes and 11 comments — including those from leaders at organizations like the LA Phil and an NGO delegation to the United Nations.
When Kristina Jespersen shared her credential, commenters included an assistant dean at Rutgers, two of her instructors, a data librarian at a major media company, and fellow graduate David Hirsch — showing how a few well-placed nudges can light up an already tight-knit community.
“Professional growth doesn’t stop at earning a certificate. Building connections can be just as valuable as building skills. Networking with peers, learning from experienced practitioners, and finding mentors can open doors to new opportunities,” Scott says.
With emails and in-credential messages running, the Accredible Professional Services team showed CPS how to see exactly who opened, shared, or added the credential to their LinkedIn profile, and how to report that progress to leadership.
“I love looking at the Accredible analytics page now,” Lilybeth raves. “The graph, the way it’s laid out, the breakdown of who is sharing is such a good visual I can pull up and show our director how we’re performing. It’s particularly nice seeing how far above average [benchmarks] we are.”
The data also helps inform future marketing spend. Per Scott, “Seeing LinkedIn shares is great, but the other data we get about shares to Facebook and other social platforms is helpful, too, because they’re additional avenues we can explore for marketing and enrollment.”
Early results from the Professional Services work, alongside a website relaunch, are already showing up in enrollment. Total fall enrollment rose 150% year over year. Among the four programs offered both years, enrollment climbed 53%. And compared with spring 2026, when CPS last offered all seven programs before the campaign launched, enrollment grew 48%.
“Before, enrollment was kind of up and down. Every once in a while, there’d be a badge we just wouldn’t run and push people to the next cohort,” Lilybeth explains. “This year, we’re getting to run all seven. It feels like everything we’re doing is falling into place.”
For CPS leadership, the impact goes beyond enrollment numbers.
“Digital credentials are about more than recognizing the completion of a program. They give our learners a way to make their expertise visible, strengthen their professional networks, and remain connected to Rutgers as their careers evolve. Our work with Accredible has helped us turn that moment of achievement into an opportunity for continued learning and engagement with our professional community,” says Julie Johnson, Ed.D., Assistant Dean for Continuing and Professional Studies.
“We’ve been doing a lot of work to improve systems and streamline processes, and it finally feels like we’re hitting our stride,” Scott says. “And Accredible has been a welcome part of our extended team.”
He’s quick to add that CPS couldn’t have gotten there alone. “If we didn’t have the Accredible hours, we definitely wouldn’t have gotten to where we have. They understood the assignment, understood our brand, listened to everything that we said, and made it happen.”
A lot of that came down to how the engagement was structured. CPS joined recurring hour-long sessions, and Accredible’s team built everything behind the scenes. “Then we’d swoop in at the end to proofread and tweak things,” says Scott.
With the heavy lifting handled, Scott and Lilybeth could put their energy toward everything else on their plates, knowing credential-related emails, social sharing, brand visibility, and analytics were in good shape.
“It made all the difference to have this type of support for a team of our size,” Lilybeth notes. “If you’re not connected with the Professional Services team, I can confidently say you are not using Accredible to its full potential.”
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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.
