In the wise words of K-pop sensation, BTS, your Yarno microlearning campaigns should run as…
…and guess what, that’s totally achievable with the right strategy in place. If you’re keen to get your learners’ brains buzzing and employ best practices that’ll see you through from objective setting, to content creation, to campaign launch, here is your 6-step guide to follow when planning your next microlearning campaign.
1. Review your long-term learning goals
While there are people using learning platforms to churn out campaigns as a “tick the box” compliance exercise, that’s NOT you. You’re better than that.
What you’ll definitely do (ಠ_ಠ) is ensure your first step is to review your long-term learning goals for the year and think through the content that’ll help align your staff’s behaviours to your overall business aspirations. If this is your first Yarno campaign then you will have just participated in a Yarno kick-off workshop to determine your learning objectives. If not, then why not revisit these objectives and plan your content accordingly?
2. “It’s a date!” Schedule your campaign
It may be the last thing you key in while setting up your campaign but it’s one of the first things you should think about! Not only is it important to consider the launch date of your campaign but also all the other dates that come into play surrounding a campaign. Here are some things to keep in mind…
- Warmup week: The invitation emails and primer questions to your embed campaigns will be sent out exactly one week prior to the campaign launch date so you’ll need to make sure your content is ready to go before then. It’s worth a quick reminder that ‘Burst’ campaigns don’t require this consideration as learners launch straight into the campaigns (no primer question emails here).
- Campaign cooldown: Once your campaign ends, there will be a cooldown period of two days, followed by a learner feedback email – the perfect opportunity to capture valuable insights on their Yarno experience.
- Campaign planning: We love a Yarno campaign, too, however, we encourage you to give your learners (and you!) a break by spacing campaigns out across the year.
3. Consider which Yarno campaign features are right for you
Whether you’ve been with Yarno for years or are one of our newer customers, knowing details about how Yarno works as well as its unique features can help optimise your campaign.
To get started, your CSM will guide you to set Yarno up, including deciding whether to run a burst or embed campaign. They will share some of our informative support articles and chat through things like how primer questions work, and how they can be a powerful tool in understanding how your learners are… well… learning!
Another thing to consider is which type of leaderboard to use for your campaign (to help boost learner engagement and play on their competitive streak). Do you want to display your leaderboard with individuals or teams – or both, or maybe you want to remove the leaderboard completely (but where is the fun in that?!)?
Perhaps you would like to leverage Yarno’s Learning Library feature. The Learning Library is designed to help learners take their learning even further with access to additional resources, in one easily accessible place.
Your Yarno CSM will definitely be on hand to help you consider which Yarno campaign features are right for you – just give them a call!
4. Capture the right content
Many of our customers utilise Yarno’s team of content writers, and many choose to write their own. Either way, here are a few things to keep in mind when preparing questions for your campaign:
- Extract the key takeaways. To create the perfect question, we use your existing knowledge and learning materials, extract the key takeaways, then deliver the need-to-know information to learners. Yarno’s approach to question writing is threefold – quiz the why, quiz the process, and quiz the consequence. It prompts your team to employ active recall, reinforces knowledge, and results in learning that lasts beyond training and into practice.
- Keep it short and sweet. Be sure your questions are concise, even if you’re writing an imagined scenario to help contextualise your question, just include whatever is necessary. It doesn’t need to be “War and Peace”. (Why not check out our 7 tips for creating scannable content before you start?)
- ^What a great segue! We highly recommend using memes, gifs, and other media (like videos or pictures) to break up text-heavy questions or explanations. This will help make the information engaging and easily digestible. We’ve also found that the more you add humour and appropriate visuals to questions, the more likely learners will engage with the content.
- Reporting. Be sure to think about reporting ahead of campaign completion by considering topic tags. If you’re keen to see how learners performed based on key subjects, attaching a topic tag to select questions can help you better scan results to see where areas for improvement may be.
5. Learner lists
While we’ve mentioned this towards the bottom of the list, it’s just as important to have your learner list prepared well in advance as much as it is your content! Learner list accuracy will help your campaign set up to run smoothly! And, we encourage you to keep your learning list updated regularly.
We recommend customers reach out to internal stakeholders early to compile learner lists to get this ball rolling – it can save lots of time (and sometimes stress) at campaign launch!
6. Spread the word!
Yarno's CSMs are once again ready and able to help you with communications ideas and recommend the following approach to inform and excite learners about upcoming Yarno campaigns:
- Create posters that can be placed in highly visible areas that learners frequent.
- Send out company-wide emails, and bulletins, and post on any social networking tools to inform team members about what Yarno is and how it’ll level up their learning. This is an opportunity to share that Yarno campaigns are an opportunity to learn rather than a means of testing.
- Stagger communications to create a buzz and clearly inform staff well before the launch date.
- Mix it up! Introduce some competitions with special prizes based on campaign performance to boost engagement amongst teams or individual learners. The sky’s the limit!
And there you have it! The key components that make up your Yarno campaign. If in any doubt, please speak with your Yarno CSM who will be happy to help. Launched a Yarno campaign? We’d love to hear about your experience! And, if you want to try Yarno for the first time, then contact us, today!
