The Decorative Plumbing + Hardware Association (DPHA) is a non-profit trade association whose mission is to connect, educate, and elevate the decorative plumbing and hardware industry. DPHA believes in the positive impact of bringing people together and taking the kitchen and bath spaces to a more elevated place.
DPHA’s members include manufacturers, independent representatives, and dealers of decorative plumbing and hardware products, like toilets, bathtubs, bathroom furniture, cabinet hardware, door hardware, and more. The association has over 2,700 individual members across more than 250 member companies.
DPHA offers a gathering place and a platform for dealers, manufacturers, and representatives within the decorative plumbing and hardware industry. But industry networking isn’t the only valuable member benefit, the education programs offered by DPHA have always been a cornerstone of the association.
Initially, DPHA simply housed educational manuals on their website, lacking ways to track usage and engagement. Their recognition program relied on Google Forms, which was a very manual process for both participants and staff. Additionally, DPHA’s member company managers lacked a way to monitor employees’ progress and performance with the education program.
DPHA knew it was time to implement a learning management system to create a more professional, automated, and robust online education program. Led by Director of Marketing and Sales Kymberly Glazer, DPHA partnered with Blue Sky eLearn to make this vision a reality.
DPHA chose Blue Sky eLearn’s Path LMS as the home of their new learning program, DPHA University. One of the key benefits of Path LMS identified by Kymberly was that the platform integrates with DPHA’s association management system, Novi AMS.
The Novi AMS and Path LMS integration for DPHA provides a seamless learner experience between the two platforms. Member company managers and their employees can login to DPHA University with the same credentials they use for DPHA via a single sign-on (SSO) integration. Path LMS also writes back eCommerce and activity data to Novi AMS, making it easy for Kymberly and her team to track and manage transactions and program completions.
DPHA enlisted Blue Sky eLearn’s Learning & Development team to help them determine how to offer and package their educational offerings under the DPHA University umbrella. They strategically broke their offerings into two programs:
Participants in the certificate program are required to pass tests within Path LMS with questions from an assessment pool. When each course is completed, learners receive an automatically generated certificate of completion. Once all The Vault courses are completed, learners receive a digital badge for their own professional purposes, and the badge is added to their profile in Novi AMS by DPHA staff.
“Before we broke it down into the two programs, it was just DPHA University, and there was a lot of confusion about paid vs. free content. Blue Sky eLearn has worked with us to strategize how to customize Path LMS to work best for our organization and provide an easy-to-navigate experience for our learners.” — Kymberly Glazer
While their education program had been a non-dues revenue stream since its inception over 10 years ago, they have been able to bolster revenue generation with the new program format by 63% in just one year. “The Vault has made our professional program much more robust and has increased enrollment numbers. We have also been able to increase the cost of the program, increasing our revenue."
Comparing DPHA’s website and their Path LMS site, it’s easy to see the care and thoughtfulness behind the graphic design and user experience. Kymberly has seamlessly translated DPHA’s brand between the two sites and took advantage of the highly customizable Path LMS interface. The site has become an important marketing tool for DPHA:
“As soon as I show prospective participants the microlearning modules, assessments, and the fact that they can track their team’s progress, then enrolling their teams becomes a no-brainer for them. Seeing, hearing, and understanding how it works through a demo has a different impact from a regular marketing email,” says Kymberly.
One of DPHA’s biggest hurdles before implementing Path LMS was giving member company managers visibility into how their employees were progressing through the certificate program. It also hindered the member companies from being able to see the real value of DPHA’s programs.
DPHA leveraged the Path LMS Teams feature to give member company managers full visibility into employees’ progress. With Path LMS Teams, they can use a single sign-on login to manage their users (or Team) and view and export a myriad of reports including content metrics, assessment completions and scores, credit completion, and more.
“Our members love that they can manage their employees’ progress with our courses,” says Kymberly. “They love how professional everything looks and operates—it is WORLDS above and beyond what we used to have.”
DPHA has big plans for expanding DPHA University, and Path LMS will allow them to scale their programs, taking their organization to new heights. They are currently working on increasing the robustness of their program content, adding additional webinars and training videos.
In the next year, they plan to add more continuing education options in Path LMS, partnering with manufacturers to offer their Continuing Education Units (CEUs) and Product Knowledge courses. DPHA’s ultimate goal is to create credential classifications unique to their industry, hosting the certification program on Path LMS.
DPHA leveraged Path LMS to create a robust certificate program that boosted non-dues revenue and provided company managers with visibility into employee progress.
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