Stefaan De Corte and Sotiria Tsalamani, experts in learning experience design and implementation at LAUREA, are sharing valuable knowledge on membership engagement.
As learning design professionals, our customers share the following main challenges:
● How to motivate our members to engage in learning?
● How to ensure what is learned, is applied in daily practice?
We recommend three concrete actions to improve engagement rates with your content and learning activities.
1) Cover the needs.
Do you really know what the needs of your members are? Do not only ‘survey’ them, but also interview them, involve them in focus group, let them reflect– it is a good way to get in-depth insights within different contexts. Any occasion is suitable to sit down with a member and ask questions related to the topics that are high on their agenda, the format of content they prefer (podcast, video, blog, e-newsletter, etc) and the format of training (in-person, online, with a live training or self-paced one), etc.. Also, make sure to interview a representative group of your membership to avoid bias.
● Offering content and trainings that are in line with the real needs of your membership will ensure their active participation.
2) Numbers speak! Yes, we mean data analytics.
This goes from the basics (what newsletter article was most popular) to the advanced type of data (did this blended training programme change your behaviour or your habits)?
We also experience that many of our customers already collect a significant number of data-points – but do not analyse them in a structured way.
● Starting to analyse the data you already collect and taking them into account when developing content and trainings, will increase your engagement rates.
3) Build blended training programmes and content repositories
Having one blog on a hot topic is nice, repackaging the same blog as a podcast, a video and an infographic is better.
Having one webinar on a topic is good but to really change the behaviour, a series of sessions is necessary. You do not effortless become an expert professional.
The above two examples imply that you need to carefully select your topics and invest in them
● Your members’ engagement with your content increases when they trust you as the information source on specific topics.