The Institute of Management Accountants (IMA) is one of the global thought leaders in the Management Accounting category. For more than four decades, IMA has provided the premier certification in Management Accounting: the CMA certification. However, in the U.S. there is low awareness of Management Accounting as a career path and the CMA as a credential.

The past year brought on many changes in business – not only in how we work, but why we work. We needed young professionals to realize the CMA opens doors for roles in business strategy and leadership. Not just reporting numbers or auditing, but making a real difference in people’s lives.

Our goal was to reach millennial and young Gen-X finance and accounting professionals. Those people who have hit a wall in their career and are looking for something that might be better suited for them.

Our primary objective was to increase awareness of the Certified Management Accountant credential exam and get more candidates to sign up for the course/credential.

Our secondary objective was to drive traffic to their website to help convert candidates. We knew making the decision to become a candidate would take time, so in order to nurture the decision and relationship, we needed them to visit the website.

At a time of uncertainty, confusion, and the need to reflect on job fulfilment and purpose, we shifted our strategy to focus on the end benefit of what having a CMA means. It’s the ability to make a difference that counts, now more than ever.

We developed a heartwarming campaign with a message to help CMAs feel good about their career choices.

We used real-life situations where CMAs made a difference for individuals, organizations, and the public -- a CMA convinced a factory to rehire the workers they laid off, prevented a hospital from closing and gave an old shirt company a new lease on life.

We demonstrated how CMAs saw what others couldn’t, so they could help organizations make better business decisions. And that led to the tagline: CMA. It makes all the difference.

The campaign was a great success. We were able to achieve all the agreed-upon KPIs. First, we increased new candidates by 9% year over year in the U.S. We had 14,000 new CMA candidates globally and 18,000 new members globally. Second, we drove over 115,000 global landing page visits and increased U.S. web users by almost 80% versus the year prior. We captured more than 13,000 U.S. leads.

Jeff Thompson, the CEO of IMA, said, “The ad campaign … emphasize[s] how accounting and finance professionals earning a CMA make a difference in their careers, in their organizations, for society as a whole. That message resonates now more than ever in the face of a global health pandemic and economic lockdowns.”