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How to Measure the Impact of Your Association’s Training
For associations of all shapes and sizes, learning and development is an important ingredient to success. Whether an organization is non-profit, professional, or connected to institutions of higher learning, their specific training needs are as varied as the organization’s membership.
Effective association training initiatives face a host of challenges, including resource constraints, rapid changes in technology, and shifting member needs. Among these obstacles, the ability to measure the impact of an association’s training efforts can be a challenge in itself. But accurate measurement of an association’s training can also bring valuable insights that help alleviate other obstacles, and bring a whole new level of clarity to your training efforts.
So, let’s look at how you can successfully scale your association’s learning and development initiatives, enhance the learning experience of your members, increase revenue and reach, and ultimately measure the impact of your efforts.
Scaling your association’s training
If your association already offers membership learning, perhaps you’re looking to build upon early successes by scaling your efforts. While this can ultimately come from many different directions, we have a few specific recommendations that we’d recommend you start with:
Manage learning online
While this recommendation might seem obvious, it’s worth highlighting that there’s no better way to scale learning efforts than to move them online. Even if your existing training is digital, but contained with presentation software and digital documents, you’re still missing out on the ease of distribution that online training affords. Learning Management Systems (LMS) offer unmatched tools for reaching and engaging more members than any other option. Learning solution software often comes equipped with features that make managing learning online simple.
Instructor-Training (ILT) can help you to connect with learners in a more personal way. If the LMS supports your webinar tool, you can create a blended learning experience by delivering the best aspects of in-person teaching with technology-based online learning methods. It’s crucial to have an LMS that integrates with the most popular webinar tools available, such as Zoom or MS Teams.
Automate certification and credit systems
Certifications and credits can be powerful incentives to encourage learning engagement. But, if you’re still relying on manual methods to award these recognitions you could be reducing their impact. After all, when is a learner more likely to be excited about something new they learned; immediately after gaining the information, or a week later?
Not only do automated certification and credit systems assure that you’re reinforcing the enthusiasm of your members, but they also ensure a level of accuracy and efficiency that’s simply not possible if you’re still awarding manually.
Chapter-specific learning environments
If your association is large enough to be comprised of different chapters, then you know that no two chapters are alike. If you’re looking for a learning solution, make sure that whatever you decide, it grows with you. One way to do this is by having features that help you to create unique environments to train every audience, including employees, partners, and customers, all under one roof.
Portals make it super simple to offer separate training experiences for different chapters of your association, so you can make sure you’re meeting the specific needs of each. This customized approach is extremely valuable for increasing member engagement, and also for achieving your target learning outcomes.
Enhancing member experience
There are several go-to strategies for up-leveling the learner experience, and they apply to the members of your association as well. First, offering personalization in training is one of the most impactful things you can do to enhance the member experience. Customizing a learning experience to meet the unique needs of an association’s members helps reinforce the value and applicability of the training itself.
Another proven way to uplevel the member experience of your training is through the use of interactive learning methods. One specific example of interactive learning is multimodal learning, which offers learners a combination of different media types (visual, auditory, reading, and kinesthetic), to reinforce concepts. Since all of us are different in our learning preferences and strengths, providing a combination of interactive media is an effective way to increase the likelihood that learners will feel engaged and motivated.
Boosting revenue and outreach
As Frances Kleven, LearnUpon’s Director of Enterprise Customer Success said in a recent webinar, ‘Strategic Member Training: Build and Retain Engaged Communities’, “It’s a given that application is important in any learning experience, but I think it can be difficult to measure and it’s sometimes forgotten about. I think member training in particular drives that home – that members are looking for something that they can they can apply and to their application or their vocation.”
One direct way to measure the impact of your association’s training is through the revenue resulting from it. By creating a branded storefront to present and sell your offerings, you’re positioning your training as valuable. While it might be tempting to offer your training content for free to maximize the reach, doing so is actually a mistake.
Attaching a fair price to your learning increases the likelihood that subsequent learners will spend the adequate time and energy to maximize the value received from it.
A satisfied learner sharing their experience and knowledge is going to be much more effective at encouraging other potential learners than any other direct marketing efforts. You should do everything possible to make it easy for learners to share their experiences, help promote your training programs to their networks, and feature quotes and other forms of social proof on your branded storefront. Lauren Davenport, Senior Manager of Education and Training at USA Football said it best:
“We have practice plans, templates, games and skill resources so coaches don’t feel like they also have to reinvent the wheel to get onto the field. We continue to give them value even after they’re certified. We also have some community platforms and resources to help keep them connected.”
Measuring impact
While being able to track attributed revenue is nice, the best way to measure the impact of your association’s training is to focus on metrics that indicate growth, not revenue.
Tracking reach and engagement
We recommend metrics like reach, which tell you how many people are actually seeing your organization’s learning, or engagement, which shows the percentage of members actually interacting with the training. Both of these numbers give you an idea of the size of your audience, and what percentage of that audience is consuming your association’s training content.
As your reach increases, however, your average engagement might actually decrease. Keeping an eye on the relationship between these two variables can help you identify opportunities to revisit your training, and increase the level of interactivity as discussed above.
Assessing chapter-specific performance
In order for your association to maximize the value of your learning efforts, it makes sense to choose a learning management system that allows the ability to track training performance by chapter. Being able to enjoy a granular look at which chapters are understanding training material best, and if certain chapters might be lacking in comprehension, can help guide future training endeavors. These sort of feedback loops, whether on the level of an individual, chapter, or entire organization, are a key ingredient of continuous improvement.
Lauren Davenport, Senior Manager of Education and Training at USA Football shared her insights into metrics they use in our webinar, ‘Strategic Member Training: Build and Retain Engaged Communities’:
“How long did they spend in the course, how long did it take them to complete it, how many times are they in LearnUpon, how many times are they going back to it? These are just some of the user engagement metrics we use.”
Hopefully this article has provided some helpful insights into the right ways to think about measuring your association’s training. Whether your goals include scaling up, enhancing your member’s experience, or boosting revenue, selecting the right learning management system is a key component of being able to accurately measure impact and improve results.
If you have any additional questions, we invite you to book a demo or chat to one of our experts.
