We've done it.
We've cracked the perfect recipe...
A toasted handful of learning objectives, half a cup of questions, a pinch of character, and a dash of imagery…and there you have it!
A well-baked Yarno campaign.
Delicious jokes aside, we’ve found that our most successful campaigns share some common themes:
- Learning analysis
- Campaign objectives
- Management involvement and support
- Clear and consistent communication to learners
- Well-written questions
- Post-campaign reflection and analysis
Let's get into it.
1. Learning analysis
The learning analysis is crucial to setting our customers up for success.
In any learning analysis, we aim to answer are:
- What's the problem we’re solving?
- How we’ll know we’ve solved it?
- What do we want learners to do differently on-the-job?
- Why aren’t they doing it now?
2. Campaign objectives
Along with the Learning analysis, overarching Campaign objectives are an indispensible element of a successful Yarno endeavour.
Think about it – how are you meant to measure success without having objectives to measure against? These are especially useful for proving training ROI.
When creating campaign objectives, we seek to answer the following questions:
- What's the business need that's driving the use of Yarno?
- What's the impact of the need or challenge currently? How widespread and frequent is it?
- What's the $ value of the need or challenge?
- How will we know when we've solved it?
3. Management involvement and support
It’s critical that both learners and managers understand what Yarno is, why it’s being rolled out and what the benefits are. We need manager buy-in for the campaign to be a success.
We also know that manager involvement is critical to the success of any learning intervention. Learners need to feel supported by their manager and given the time to complete Yarno each day.
If managers are enthusiastic about their team’s learning and development, it makes it easier for employees to be engaged and excited too.
Even better, managers have the knowledge and expertise to help inform the most relevant, accurate content that learners need to know to become better at what they do. And to do this effectively, managers need to be involved early, and involved often.
4. Communication
Once we understand what we’re trying to achieve with the campaign, how success will be measured and who the learners are, we start writing a communication plan that outlines how we’ll communicate with them.
Alongside manager involvement, clear and consistent communication is key to a successful campaign.
Past communication methods for customers have included; webinars, teaser emails, flyers and in-person presentations.
An easy way to keep the communication channels open is for managers to schedule check-ins by phone, email or in-person with learners – the best part is that all the information managers need can be found in the Yarno dashboard!
5. Awesome questions
Writing great questions and answers isn’t rocket science, but it is a skill.
To write multiple choice questions that reinforce and expand knowledge, and mould behaviour you can come at a subject from three ways:
- Quiz the why: why is it essential for your staff to know or do something?
- Quiz the process: how specifically is something done? Or what are the details of the idea?
- Quiz the consequence: what are the ramifications of doing or not doing something, or knowing or not knowing something?
It's best to begin by writing draft question ideas down that relate to your learning objectives. We use a free online tool called Trello to do this since it makes collaboration super easy. Or you could use an Excel spreadsheet.
The, it's time to group questions ideas into topics. We recommend 5-10 topics for a campaign. Any more than this and we’d suggest splitting the content out into a second campaign.
The importance of subject matter experts:
From experience, we’ve found it’s important for Subject Matter Experts to review questions and answers before campaign launch. This ensures the integrity and accuracy of the Yarno content.
6. Post-campaign analysis
Once a campaign has finished, it's important to come together as a team to review the results against the original goals and success measures, and collate any learner or manager feedback.
In terms of feedback, learners can give feedback in-app at any point in the campaign. Learner feedback is gold for us as a company, and for our customers too. To improve and adapt, feedback is critical.
(To streamline the feedback process, we also have a nifty NPS feature built into the post-campaign email to gain valuable feedback from learners.)
Ultimately, the goal of post-campaign reflection is to inform future campaigns and learning interventions. So by taking the time to reflect on what went well and what can be improved, you can ensure that future training investment focuses on areas identified as having the most significant impact.
Wrap-up
Well, there we have it!
The 6 key ingredients that combine to create an epic Yarno campaign.
As a quick note on Burst campaigns, as I mentioned earlier: Burst campaigns will involve different preparation than Embed campaigns – due to the nature of the question delivery (short, sequential campaigns that are often time-sensitive).
That being said, making the effort to write well-written questions and communicate effectively with learners gives the greatest chance of success, regardless of campaign type!
And as always – if you're interested in hearing more about our approach to learning and performance, please get in touch with us here, or subscribe to our blog below for regular updates!
To learn about the big impact little bites of learning can have, download our microlearning white-paper.
