What do donors want from the organizations they support? According to a report from Charity Navigator, it’s exactly what you’d expect. They want to have a demonstrable impact on causes they’re passionate about. To raise awareness and encourage involvement, organizations need to be able to show how their work changes lives.
But that can be easier said than done. The same Charity Navigator report suggested that many organizations simply don’t share enough information to properly inform donors’ decisions.
To engage with external stakeholders, your staff needs to be trained to spread the word about your work through effective campaigns and programs.
Supporting Your Mission: The ROI of Learning
A 2019 report from the nonprofit organization NTEN showed that 90% of staff members who participated in professional development felt they were better able to succeed in their jobs as a result. Delivering this training through an interactive, personalized learning program can help build capacity and create the kind of impact that attracts donors and volunteers.
Personalized learning can also help constituents understand your mission and determine the best way to get involved. Educational programs are often more engaging than traditional letter campaigns or email donation requests. When you show how your organization is making a difference, emotional connections form and the community is more likely to support your cause.
But how can you be sure these programs have a positive impact on ROI? It’s difficult to track engagement and outcomes without centralized data, which you can’t reliably measure with most traditional approaches to constituent education. For a learning program to be worth the time and effort, you need to know how participants interact with content—and whether interaction translates into benefits for your organization.
Align Learning With Strategic Objectives
To maximize engagement and ROI, learning paths must lead to outcomes that move your organization forward. Staff, volunteers and external stakeholders who complete your programs should gain a better understanding of what you do, why you do it and how they can support you.
D2L Brightspace is built to align education with strategic objectives. Automated workflows streamline course creation and enable you to provide a personalized experience to each participant. Powered by an adaptive learning engine, Brightspace delivers content based on knowledge and skill levels so that learners gain proficiency in unfamiliar topics rather than spend time relearning what they already know.
Messaging, discussions and other social learning tools connect instructors to learners and encourage interaction between learners on similar educational paths. This sense of community brings people together to support your mission as they discover more about the cause you support.
Reach External Stakeholders With Community Education
Taking personalized learning beyond internal training provides another potential revenue stream. With D2L Course Publisher and Course Merchant you can offer programs to stakeholders anywhere in the world through a branded storefront. Self-service sign-up, mobile accessibility and automated content delivery create a scalable model without adding to your administrative burden.
Longwood Gardens, an organization dedicated to preserving great gardens and making natural beauty “accessible to all,” brings its message and mission to a global following through the D2L platform.
“We knew that technology could enable us to provide an instant view into our world at Longwood and communicate our knowledge to a much larger audience than we have traditionally been able to reach,” says Susan Caldwell, instructional designer and learning techniques manager at Longwood. “By providing a great online experience, we would help them understand the relevance of our work.”
Even free programs focused on education and awareness can increase revenue. Stakeholders who complete courses that give them a better understanding of your mission may become regular donors. Others may choose to volunteer and help spread your message through campaigns and activism.
But you don’t have to guess whether your community education efforts are effective. Course Publisher pulls external learner data into Brightspace in real time to show which programs have the greatest impact on engagement and ROI.
Longwood Gardens
Planting the Seeds of Learning Worldwide
Using D2L Brightspace, Longwood Gardens is engaging a wider audience with the natural world, helping to excite the next generation of horticulturists.
Use Analytics to Visualize Learners’ Progress
Once your program is in place, data from D2L Performance+ makes it easy to visualize and track engagement, progress and completion. Advanced analytics and reporting tools show how many people access your programs and which milestones they’ve reached.
Vision Australia’s learning and development coordinator, Laura Hendrey, finds these reporting features “very useful” for understanding how members interact with the organization’s programs.
“In the past, we had no clear insight into how our people were using our online learning resources,” she explains. “Today, the Manager Dashboard gives us a real-time snapshot of everyone’s progress, and our managers can download the data into a report very easily.”
Create Personalized Data Reports to Track ROI
Learning analytics services from D2L can tailor your Performance+ dashboard to display data that directly impacts program ROI. With this data on hand, you can quickly determine:
- which courses learners access and complete most often
- how many learners achieve the program’s intended outcomes
- where learners struggle or become disengaged
Skilled learning analysts work with you to focus your energy on efforts that improve the learning experience, reengage participants and encourage higher completion rates. Staff and volunteers who reach every milestone on their learning paths are better equipped to carry out campaigns that encourage donations and advance your organization’s mission.
Get Expert Guidance to Build Great Learning Experiences
D2L’s team of experts is there to help you create educational programs with milestones that guide learners toward key objectives—and meet their unique challenges along the way. With support from the Learning Services team, Vision Australia was able to develop and deliver accessible programs for its blind and low-vision members.
“I’ve been really impressed at how easy it is to build learning experiences in the Brightspace platform,” says Learning and Development Manager Dan Casey. “The strong support we received from D2L from the initial deployment onward has been extremely helpful, and we are now able to create in-depth, curriculum-driven online classes for the first time.”
Vision Australia
A Clear Vision of Learning for All
Around 15% of Vision Australia’s workforce are blind or have low vision, so to ensure that everyone can benefit from its training resources, the company is using D2L’s Brightspace platform to deliver highly accessible online courses.
Support Your Mission and Increase ROI With Learning
D2L’s tools reduce the time and resources needed to create and deploy personalized programs that connect your organization with the constituents who support your mission. With more time and energy for service and activism, your staff and volunteers can focus on showing the value of your work—which draws the long-term support that keeps your organization viable.
“One of our objectives with using D2L for our open course platform is to reach a global audience,” says Matt Ross, director of continuing education at Longwood. “Cumulatively, we’ve already had thousands of learners experience the D2L platform, and … we’re hoping to reach out to tens of thousands more.”
Want to see how D2L can help your nonprofit engage more support and increase ROI? Get in touch today to schedule a demo.
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