How We Made This: Community Accelerator
Whenever we design a shiny new learning program, we like to give you folks a look behind the scenes. This time, I'll share a little about the work that went into our Community Accelerator, a learning program for community builders who want to do more with & for their workplace communities. First, we must answer the big questions:
Who is this program for?
One of the most important questions we ask ourselves as we're starting any new learning design project is "who are we designing for?" In this case, our primary learner persona was an internal workplace community leader in a large company:
In practical terms, that deceptively simple persona represents a HUGE diversity of individuals, from someone in the early stages of building a new community of practice inside their organization, to a long-time ERG leader, to an intensely motivated individual trying to grow a grassroots movement for change inside their company. So our single persona was just the starting point for a much bigger and messier map of our potential learners' different contexts, experience levels, and roles.
But we didn't just come up with all of these details on our own; to tease out some of the nuances about our future learners, we dove right into my super-most-favorite part of the learning design process: research!
What can we learn about workplace communities & their leaders?
We always continually research throughout our design and development process, so at this stage, we just wanted to get the lay of the land by investigating a handful of key topics related to workplace communities: types of communities, community manager roles, success measures, gaps in the literature & market.
We also set ourselves up to learn even more first-hand information through outreach to ERG and other workplace community leaders from our networks and our Cultivators Community.
What problems are we positioned to help solve?
Next, I created a design brief based on our discussions about the program and the research findings. Our design briefs always begin with a problem statement. For this program, the problems we felt we could help solve included filling a gap in the PD landscape by focusing specifically on internal workplace communities vs. the customer communities and broader online communities that other learning programs tended to focus on.
“It didn’t feel like a community as much as a series of events that tended to attract the same crowd over and over again.”
We saw that people managing ERGs & communities of practice (or other communities designed for the employees inside a given organization) had access to some information and best practices. Still, we didn't discover any live learning programs that catered specifically to the needs of those community leaders or that prioritized bringing workplace community leaders together to learn from each other as a cohort. This was just one of the problems we wanted to address. We'd refine our understanding of our future learners' problems as we moved forward with the subsequent phases of design, development, and ongoing research.
Let's make something new!
Thought leadership
At this point, we were ready to start developing some learning, and we decided to begin by defining our own clear and specific standpoint on workplace communities. Because "community" is such an industry buzzword, we needed to articulate precisely what we mean when we say "workplace community" and our position on the potential those communities hold when it comes to empowering their members and influencing their organizational cultures as a whole. We decided to accomplish this by creating a short thought-leadership piece called "Workplace Communities, Explained." The piece of content was created by mining our team members' own professional experiences, our experiences working with clients building internal communities, and our research findings.
You can find a copy of the resulting artifact here, but the most important element we included in this piece was a new definition of workplace communities:
This definition and the related examples became a crucial touchstone for us as we moved forward with our new program's design and development process.
Learning design
No matter how many times you do it, designing quality learning objectives & program outlines is tough. You have to distill down all of your ideas, research, audience analysis, benchmarks, L&D best practices, and a million other points of information into a handful of concise statements (objectives) that represent the promises you're making to your future learners. Then, you have to figure out a way to come through on those promises within a limited amount of time and using only the tools you have at your disposal.
After a few rounds of iteration, these are the four objectives we landed on for the program:
Define (or re-define) your community’s purpose: Learn how to establish a vision & purpose that you & your community members can get behind. By defining and understanding why your community exists, you’ll know how to talk about it in front of prospective members and senior leaders.
Design your community member experience: Those of us that have experienced the trials and tribulations of an unengaged community know that deep connections don’t happen overnight. Worthwhile experiences must be intentionally designed and actively managed.
Use data to align your community with business objectives: You may not be able to rely on traditional metrics to speak to your community's success. We’ll help you identify which metrics matter the most, and how to build a narrative that clearly aligns with your organization’s goals.
Be an exceptional community leader in 2021 and beyond: We know you have to wear a lot of hats. Build on your current strengths as you learn to leverage modern tools, manage stakeholders & sponsors, communicate & collaborate at any scale, and grow your community’s influence in your organization.
I like to use an action-mapping approach at this stage to build out the first version of a program plan that centers on what the learners will be doing to progress toward those objectives (vs. what content they'll be consuming about the topic). The general template looks a bit like a target with the objectives in the center, surrounded by a ring filled with activities learners might engage with to make progress toward one or more of the objectives, followed by a ring of the information the learners will need to get the most out of those activities. Here's a truncated version of the action map I created for this program, but instead of a target, this one is made of hexagonal blocks like a beehive because, umm… honeybees are cool:
From there, I fleshed out an outline and sequence of activities and reviewed them with team members. Based on that revised plan, I created a detailed list of deliverables and a complete project plan, including a timeline and tasks to keep the team on the same page as we moved into a series of development sprints for the next 3-4 months leading up to the start of the first cohort. At a high level, this was the initial list of deliverables we set out to create:
Slides & facilitation content for 8 live sessions
Participant workbook with all templates & activities
4 blog posts with supplemental content & examples
15+ homework assignments & Slack prompts
Digital inspiration board & collaboration space using Miro
Digital card deck on community personality
Community data tracking tool
Digital badge certifying program completion
Welcome package with program materials & surprise gifts
Experience design
I'm a teacher and learning designer by trade and training, but here at Cultivate, we don't just think of our learning programs as classes; we think of them as experiences, which means we also apply an experience design lens to all of our projects. That mostly means taking inspiration from all kinds of experiences we enjoy and admire. Still, it also means asking ourselves even more questions at every level and stage of the process, from strategy to logistics:
How can we design for those who are willing to invest the maximum amount of time and energy, while also making sure participants with more time constraints can still have a valuable experience?
What platforms and tools will participants use to interact with the content, each other, and us?
Where can we infuse more elements of surprise, delight, and connection into the program?
What barriers to entry can we reduce or eliminate?
How can we account for participants’ different locations and time zones in our designs?
More learning design
Around here, we don't want to create learning experiences built for passively consuming content; we want to make hands-on, inclusive, and social experiences that give people a chance to learn individually and collaboratively as they apply tools and concepts at the moment. That requires putting a TON of time and effort into designing each activity in a program like this. Here's one example of an activity breakdown from the program:
You can imagine the scope and complexity of the design process as a whole when you consider that this is an overview of just one activity of dozens in the program. Also, because each of the deliverables is interrelated, we have limited time to create each one. We have to be extra thoughtful about our development sequence–designing and testing the activity instructions and tools so we know they'll work, designing the templates so the image can be included in the slides and used as the model for creating the examples in the blog post, creating the blog post so the link can be added to the Slack prompt as a reminder about the homework, etc.
To organize that whole complex operation, we used our trusty project management swiss-army-knife: Airtable.
Our Airtable setup allowed us to hand deliverables back and forth between team members as we moved through the various iterations. It allowed us to see how each element would become part of the cohesive learner experience as the detailed instructional plan evolved.
Development
Like all other aspects of this process, development happened iteratively in parallel with ongoing design and research. The learning team & graphic design team members spent most of our time on workbook design for the first couple of months because we needed to get a finalized version of the workbook to the printers early enough to be printed and shipped to each participant. Our goal was to create an artifact that would guide the participants during all session activities and homework assignments while also serving as an ongoing resource long after the program ended. It needed to be a concise but comprehensive tool the learners would return to repeatedly both during and after the program. We also wanted it to be beautiful, with a clean aesthetic that fit our brand and wouldn't contribute to cognitive overload for the learners.
After we landed on a visual style and overall structure, every page of our workbook went through a process of ideation, prototyping, testing, development, review, revision, and proofing before it was finalized. After weeks of work, we ended up with our final product:
When the workbook was complete, we were able to integrate the activities throughout the live session materials. We polished the content, refined the presentation slides, and found as many opportunities as possible to elevate the experience in the final days leading up to the first session.
By the time we were through (22 weeks from start to finish), we had created & delivered:
14 hours of live online programming,
8 slide decks (300 slides total),
an 80-page printed workbook,
1 interactive digital version of the workbook,
1 original card deck for identifying a community's personality,
3 blog posts, a handful of other digital resources,
a digital badge, and
over 20 online discussion posts.
The first cohort
After months of work, we launched the program for our first cohort in May 2021. Our first live session wrapped up with all 16 participants representing 11 companies gathered around our digital campfire making mini s'mores from their welcome kits.
Throughout the six weeks of the program, the learners shared their experiences in the live sessions and in the dedicated Slack channel we created for them in our Cultivators Community.
When we collected their feedback at the end of the program, we received some great ideas for improvement we can implement before the next cohort. We also saw lots of evidence that our program had helped people accomplish their goals and feel more empowered and confident as community leaders:
NPS score: 83
Over 80% of participants felt more empowered after participating in the program.
Some of the actions the cohort planned to take as a result of their work in the program showed they had internalized many of the key ideas we set out to share with them:
"[I'm] empowering members to help me develop the strategy moving forward."
"After knowing how serious this role is, I am planning to ask my CEO for more helping hands and brains on this!"
"We have been looking at rituals a lot within our groups. The resources you've given us are fantastic and will be used as a resource for our volunteers for years to come."
"[I plan to] do a mini-session of the accelerator program with our leadership team, so each pillar under our ERG is equipped with the information/tools I now have."
Several participants shared positive feedback about their experience in the program as a whole. This not only warms my little designer heart but also helps our team know what's working, so we don't lose those elements as we continue to improve the program for future cohorts.
"I am doing this for the first time and underestimated this project. I am so glad that I came across this at the right time."
"I didn't understand the importance of having an ending ritual. It was eye-opening to do just a minute of reflection and how connected it made me feel to the purpose of the work and also to one another!"
"This was an incredible experience; the cohort was great - amazing first acceleration program!"
"The time spent sharing - hearing what others are doing - the facilitation abilities of Steve to guide us along. All really sooo well done. Having the community threads as a way to stay connected is also brilliant."
What's next?
Since we wrapped up the first cohort, we've been combing back through the feedback and other data, bringing on new team members with a fresh perspective, and tightening the screws of the program wherever we can find something to improve. For our next cohort in the fall, we're going to try a slightly different format, with biweekly sessions spread across four weeks instead of our original six-weeks approach. Since some of our participants had trouble accessing Slack due to company firewalls, we're experimenting with different ways of engaging between sessions.
If you'd like to see how we make the next version of the Community Accelerator even better (and learn how to elevate your workplace community along the way), you can apply here!
