How Partnerships Experience Academy Drove Explosive Growth with Intellum

Meet impact.com, the world’s leading partnership management platform. Their goal is to transform the way businesses manage and optimize partnerships—including traditional rewards affiliates, influencers, commerce content publishers, and more.

They created Partnerships Experience Academy (PXA) to help people: 

• Learn the industry to increase their total addressable market (TAM) and 
• Learn the product, leading to increased adoption and lower client churn. 

Their goal? Become the “Harvard” for Partnerships Education.

The PXA team serves two main audiences: prospects and customers. They help both audiences learn the industry and get them thinking outside the box about what partner or affiliate marketing could look like. Additionally, they educate customers taking on affiliate marketing responsibilities at their job. 

Challenge

During a phase of hypergrowth, Director of Partnerships Experience Academy, Samantha Parsons, realized PXA’s existing learning management system (LMS) couldn’t grow with the academy. 

The company’s new vision for the academy was expansive. They were taking the calculated risk of investing heavily into education—both customer education and internal employee education—as a key avenue for impacting KPIs and other important business metrics. And to accomplish that, they needed a robust LMS that was built for educating multiple audiences.

Selecting the right LMS was important not only for Samantha’s team (the academy) but also the people operations and sales enablement teams.  

Together, these groups outlined a list of requirements, including:

• The ability to gate content
• A clean and intuitive user experience (UX)
• The flexibility to customize to support a number of learner audiences
• Native integrations, especially with systems like Salesforce
• Advanced reporting
• The ability to control permissions for different admin types

Solution

The impact.com team commissioned a request for proposal (RFP) to determine which LMS they would choose. They leaned on insights from the Customer Education Slack channel, as well as an advisor, to create a list of top contenders. 

An internal committee of 10 people reviewed RFP responses and attended demos to narrow down the selection. The group used scorecards to make a final decision—with Intellum surfacing as the clear winner, thanks to positive customer feedback, a thoughtful migration plan, and strong technical competency.

"Migrating an academy is no small undertaking. Not only do you have to ensure all of your content is migrated over, you also have to consistently communicate with learners, confirm all integrations are properly set up, and myriad other tasks. Intellum's migration team took us through the process step by step, and we launched to a big spike in learner numbers and engagement." - Samantha Parsons, Director of PXA at impact.com

The team was able to quickly implement Intellum, with Parsons commenting that they “could have easily gotten set up with Intellum from the beginning, as the set up was better than our previous starter platform.”

The PXA team felt confident about Intellum's ability to gate content. With their previous LMS, content was either fully available or behind an account gate. With Intellum, they were able to gate, ungate, or partially gate content. This functionality meant impact.com could serve up the same content to different audiences—but choose how much of it they could see before needing to create an account or log in. This allowed them to consolidate to one education brand for both internal and external education. It also afforded them additional SEO capabilities, so they could rank for organic search terms related to their content. 

The PXA team was also interested in the Insights module, which gave impact.com the ability to show partners where people on their team were at with certifications. Managers were able to pull reports about employee performance and progress as well.

Results

The “bet” on education impact.com made is paying off: the growth of PXA has been nothing short of astounding.

More than 12,000 learners have come to PXA since its launch on Intellum in 2021—including 1,000 impact.com employees. Those learners have completed more than 3,500 certifications, and PXA’s average course NPS reports a strong 55. The team has grown from one team member to 14 employees so they can continue to grow at their current pace.

The PXA team is committed to meeting learners where they are—whether they’re in the platform, in the help center, or browsing the internet on LinkedIn or Google. And they’re creating content with an SEO-first mentality, making use of the Intellum platform’s capabilities to get their academy content organically ranking for search engines.

Hear Samantha Parsons and Marc Undeberg (Manager of PXA) talk a bit about PXA’s growth during a recent webinar:

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What’s next for PXA? 

Next up for PXA is driving increased learning engagement through community and gamification.

They’re leveraging Intellum’s built-in, reputation-based gamification to award learners with credentials, reputation points, and even redeemable “gold.” They also plan to use challenges to boost engagement and drive additional learning by tapping into some healthy peer-to-peer competition.