For associations offering courses and certifications, having basic metrics on things like participation counts and revenue are critical – but just the start. To grow your education business, you need to take advantage of the sophisticated metrics now available through modern data analytics – trends, behaviors, preferences, popularity, geography and much more.
The Nucleus data analytics platform has two dedicated and ready-to-use packages for precisely these types of analysis: Learning Management and Certifications.
If your association is like most today, you use a variety of software systems and there is useful member data contained in each of them. Nucleus was designed specifically to bring all this data together and provide effortless, browsable exploration and insights to everyone on staff.
Organizations that solely offer courses will want to deploy the Learning Management package. It measures activity for courses such as popularity, revenue trends, and geography of participants. It can also measure the success of related product sales such as e-book, video recordings, and exams. It can also provide valuable data on course completions by day, week, and month and by payment types such as comp, paid, and discount coupon.
“Information is the oil of the 21st century, and analytics is the combustion engine.” – Peter Sondergaard, Senior Vice President, Gartner Research.
This information can provide the answer to some interesting questions such as:
- Who is my most popular or successful instructor? By analyzing the participation trends, you will be able to recognize which instructors your members are gravitating towards and which they are avoiding. In addition to reviewing evaluations, you will have a much more accurate picture to support your future planning.
- Which courses are most commonly taken after the completion of a given course? By knowing this, you can segment the data and market the most appropriate future courses to each participant based on their individual activity.
- Which courses are most popular with my newest members or my youngest members? One of the most powerful features of a modern data analytics solution is that it blends data from multiple data sources. By blending membership data with your courses data, you can measure and analyze segments of data – i.e. members with fewer than 5 years of tenure or members who are millennials or Gen Z. This is real knowledge! If you learn that a particular instructor who is popular with your youngest members is teaching a class in Texas, it makes sense that you would want to alert all your relevant members (& non-members) in that area.
“Data is the new oil? No, data is the new soil”
– David McCandless, British data journalist and TED speaker
Organizations that offer full certifications for those participants who complete a set number of courses and/or requirements will also benefit from the Certification Package. It measures counts, revenue, and geography of certification participants, while also making it easy to segment and measure activity and drive recertification. Perhaps most importantly, it allows you to measure and analyze the certification journey of each individual participant.
Again, this information can help answer so some interesting questions such as:
- What courses do I need to be prepared to offer based on the progress of my participants?
- Which participants should I be sending a coupon or other incentive to so they reactivate their participation?
- Which courses are taking the longest and are impacting revenue on other courses?
Similarly to the Learning Management package, the Certification package is most valuable when the data is blended with other data such as membership, email marketing, and web tracking. Further, activity from course and certification participation is an extremely valuable contribution to an overall Membership Engagement Scoring measurement. Those proceeding through the certification journey are obvious future leaders and possibly future members if not currently members.
“This is my favorite part about analytics: Taking boring flat data and bringing it to life through visualization.” John Tukey, mathematician
Parting thought
User-friendly analysis of course and certification trends and measurements will help you understand the nuanced behavior and preferences of your participants, identify segments of popularity for each of your offerings, and more – and being able to overlay all of this course and certification information with the member data contained in your other systems opens up possibilities for breakthrough insights in learning, certification and other areas. Talk to the data experts at Gravitate to get a better sense of how Nucleus can help you know your members/participants better and make decisions with confidence.
