Author Details:
- Name: Symphonie Swift
- Title: Product Marketing Manager
- Company: Macmillan Learning
Tell us about you, your company, and your team?
Macmillan Learning is a privately-held, family-owned company that inspires what’s possible for every learner. We envision a world where all students succeed and work to make that vision a reality by creating meaningful content, innovative technologies, and engaging learning experiences for students of all abilities and backgrounds.
How does your role and your team support your company and its goals?
We focus on connecting educators and institutions with the resources that can best support their teaching goals and enhance student learning. We listen to the needs of instructors, administrators, and students to ensure that our content, tools, and services align with the evolving educational landscape.
Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve?
Our team put this solution in place for higher educational professionals looking for upskilling opportunities to better address the challenges they are facing in their teaching today. After confirming interest for courses that Macmillan Learning could offer customers–due to our excellent subject matter experts (SMEs)–we needed to determine what might be missing as part of the professional development experience. We heard again and again the importance of networking and peer learning opportunities, and we knew that a community aspect to our offering could solve this problem. Unlike other professional development offerings out there, we developed not only a best-in-class course, but were able to complement it with a best-in-class community, giving our customers what they were looking for.
What is a recent win, major innovation, or challenge your team has tackled in the past year that this solution helped you address? Describe the challenge, opportunity, and teams involved.
One year ago, our marketing and communications teams came together with a proposal for an emerging business opportunity: a professional development that addressed an immediate challenge facing instructors today–AI in the classroom. We used this as an opportunity to develop a professional development experience unlike others that included synchronous, asynchronous and peer-to-peer learning. Our offering, the Institute at Macmillan Learning, created accountability community experiences alongside the course content, supporting participants as they upskill to meet key professional challenges in real time.
Leveraging the use of the Khoros Community, our team created a closed Group Hub community to facilitate an integrated support ecosystem for participants’ professional practice. The community provides participants with accountability and networking opportunities, which enhance the overall professional development experience. After launching the first iteration of the Institute's first course offering, Teaching with Generative AI: A Course for Educators, in May of 2024, the community quickly became one of our company’s top five performing communities on the Khoros platform, accounting for more than 11% of page views across all of our company’s communities. Our community was also the first to successfully drive engagement outside of impressions, accounting for more than 89% of content interactions (Kudos given), contributing to an engagement rate of nearly 12% on the Institute’s community content.
This success in engagement was largely driven by our marketing and communications teams’ commitment to community monitoring and moderation, which encouraged continued and sustained engagement from participants in the course.
What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change.
As an emerging business opportunity to create solutions for new audiences outside of only current customers, the Institute ran as a pilot program earlier this year with two iterations of the Teaching with Generative AI course, starting in May and July. Previously, our company had not explored offering professional development as a service; through this process–and largely due to the success of the accountability community in Khoros–we were able to validate the idea and demonstrate its potential to generate revenue.
What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change.
For this pilot offering, our team sought to answer a couple of key questions:
- Can we provide professional development as a service? And
- Can we reach audiences in new markets?
We learned that the answer to both of these questions is yes; customers are willing to pay for the service and we are working to scale it, and we reached new customers who were not previous adopters of our other products and services (94.6% of course participants were new customers). After the first two courses, we can report an NPS score of 58.8% for completers of the courses, and a retention rate of 99.1%. We also tracked traffic to our web pages and webinars during the promotion of the Institute and experienced a spike in both.
What differentiated the Khoros Communities solution in your ability to achieve/deliver on your goals for the year? What in the solution helped enable it? Were other factors involved?
An area of focus for us was community engagement. We aimed to encourage participants not only to respond to the work in their professional development course, but also to engage with each other. The solution allowed us to have discussion threads that made engagement easy, as participants could either cut/paste their assignment or attach it, with their peers offering feedback to them. Since there were so many people, we also summarized the key learnings from the group in a weekly blog post, which was also hosted in the closed community.
What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge?
Our company has used Khoros to host many communities for years now, so we knew the platform would serve us well to address our needs of creating a community that could accompany our course offering. We specifically found the different nodes within a closed Group Hub helpful for organizing the community and ensuring that it was easy to navigate for participants. Thanks to the available nodes within Khoros, we were able to create a discussion forum, Q&A, resource library (tkb) and a designated space for course highlights (blog), all easily accessible for participants in the course.