Company: Cisco Meraki
Company background: We create 100% cloud managed IT that simply works. At Cisco Meraki, we believe that by simplifying powerful technology, we can free passionate people to focus on their mission.
Founded in 2006, Meraki has grown to become an industry leader in the IT space, with over 1.6 million active networks worldwide. Our comprehensive set of solutions includes wireless, switching, security, communications, EMM, and security cameras, all managed through Meraki’s web-based dashboard interface. This allows customers to seize new business opportunities and reduce operational costs.
Contact: Caroline Sekar
Title: Community Manager
Related URLs: https://community.meraki.com
Lithy category: B2B Community Innovator
1. Describe the innovation(s) and how you settled on the decision to innovate (user request, Lithium suggestion, internal idea, etc.)
Meraki’s Training & Evangelism team is responsible for customer and partner training and certification, with a goal of supporting market adoption of Meraki’s cloud networking platform. The Meraki Community is sponsored by the Training & Evangelism team, and is destined to become THE hub for customer and partner learning and engagement.
Key to NEXT year’s Training & Evangelism roadmap is incorporation of our existing technical training programs into the community through development of on-demand content and integration with an LMS.
For this year (the community’s first), we wanted to take an initial step in integration between the community and training programs even before completing the prerequisites for a more complete system. We hoped to give Meraki trainees a reason to join the nascent community and to start to see it as the go-to resource.
The solution? Community profile badges for Meraki certifications!
 Certified Meraki Networking Associate badge |  Certified Meraki Network Operator badge |
The problems? There were a few:
- Customer and partner certifications are held in our Salesforce instance, which is not yet integrated with the Meraki Community.
- Community members may well sign up for the community with a different email address than they used for certification. How would we identify them?
- Would people even care?
What did we do? We decided to just go for it. The badging process would be manual, via Excel manipulation and CSV upload, and there would likely be plenty of customer support emails from folks who expected to get a badge but didn’t. As far as whether or not people would care, we had received a few comments on our community indicating that members wanted recognition for their certifications, which was enough evidence for us to give it a shot.
2. Tell us about how you made it happen Did you stage it first, who got an early look, how you drove adoption/use, and any iterations you had to make to get it right.
We launched certification badges in January with a blog post and by granting badges to all community members who already had CMNA or CMNO certifications (which sent them an automated notification, resulting in over 400 clicks).
Almost immediately, a few members asked how they could refer to these badges on LinkedIn, so we wrote up instructions on how to reference community profiles in LinkedIn’s “Certifications” section. We hadn’t foreseen our members’ desire to do this, but we reacted quickly to great effect (the LinkedIn instructions have been viewed over 8,500 times). 
Then, in March, we started sending emails to CMNAs / CMNOs who didn’t yet have community accounts, to let them know about the possibility of getting a badge in the community and referencing it on LinkedIn. We started with a small group of CMNAs and A/B tested email subjects and copy, landing on an email that resulted in a 50% open rate and 40% click-to-open ratio. Not wanting to have thousands of new users all at once, we sent these emails out in batches over a few months, timing the batches with other events on the community such as First Post Month.
3. What were the results? Tell us how it impacted your customer experience or the outcomes you seek as a business.
Certification badges have been a great first step for us in integrating the community with our training programs. They give a concrete reason for partners and customers who go through our trainings to sign up with the community and engage with other members, even before we have training content available there.
We have granted over 5,000 certification badges, and our community has just over 10,000 members, so clearly this has been a big membership driver! We are also raising the profile of our certification programs by encouraging participants to reference them on LinkedIn.
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