Imagine this: management asks you as an L&D person to develop a learning solution about, I’ll name it, sustainability. You get to work enthusiastically and a great learning product emerges. But results fail to materialize. Your colleagues follow your learning solution, but afterwards the intrinsic motivation to work with sustainability is still missing. How could you have done this differently? How can you bind, fascinate and activate your colleagues?
As L&D practitioners, we are constantly working to design thoughtful and well-researched learning solutions. But just as important is the way we convey the content information. This contributes greatly to the intrinsic motivation of the target group. I am sure that you too know examples of fun learning forms with weak content that resonate better with the target group than a well-researched but boring learning product.
Didactic and activating learning
How do you manage to design a learning solution that is both didactically sound and activating? For the answer, we can borrow from another field: marketing. The marketing world is all about holding the attention of the target audience. Responding to a need and then prompting action. Marketers are very good at captivating people and instilling small routines in the target group. Exactly what an L&D professional also wants to achieve: applying new knowledge, skills and behavior must become a routine. This reinforces knowledge processing and makes acquiring and applying new knowledge an automatism.
But watch out! There is one major pitfall: routine can lead to monotony, boredom and disinterest. For example, that annual compliance training, which is the same every year. Do you have to do that training for the umpteenth time? Then you feel like you’re not going to learn anything new and so you’re more likely to drop out. You want to avoid that, of course. How do our friends in marketing deal with this?
Omnichannel learning
The great trick of marketers is to proclaim the same message in different ways and at different times. Geared to the medium and geared to the target group. The moment an advertisement starts to get on your nerves, it disappears from TV and the message gets a whole new look. And in a magazine, on social media and in the bus shelter you see the message again in completely different forms. This is so-called omnichannel marketing: communicating a consistent message through different communication channels. This keeps you watching the same message with fascination for months.
And there you have the core of a good learning campaign. By using various, coherent learning interventions and offering them through different channels, you can keep your target audience interested. Omnichannel learning! People engage more deeply with a topic over a longer period of time, without losing interest or enthusiasm. But how do you do that?
Inspire-Activate-Facilitate
Time to add another marketing trick: a content strategy model that revolves around inspiring, activating and facilitating. This method – based on a model originally designed by Google and YouTube – helps organize and plan interventions effectively. This model accommodates various types of content: content that attracts attention, content that activates and content that gains users’ trust. By offering this information according to a predetermined frequency, you ensure that a topic becomes part of the target audience’s routine.
Inspire
The inspiration phase is meant to attract attention, inspire people and make it clear why an issue is important. Taking the example of sustainability again, this could include a campaign video, a physical event with a relevant speaker or a poster with thought-provoking statements.
Activate
In the activation phase, the interventions are smaller so it can happen more often. The goal is to capture the loyalty of your target group and make the message a topic of conversation within your organization. Think of a poll you distribute among employees, a short podcast or a suggestion box. In this way, people actively engage with the content.
Facilitate
Facilitation content is the foundation of your learning campaign. The target audience can go to a central place for information and answers to current questions. The idea is that people always go to this place when they are looking for information or have a question. And that they have the feeling that you can always go there. Routine! Examples are a discussion forum, microlearnings or a library with an overview of available protocols.
More inspiration?
