Summary of Client’s Challenge
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control tasked and funded this national non-profit to develop and deliver a communication skills training to regional teen pregnancy prevention-focused non-profits. The desired outcome was creating regional capacity for effectively communicating a clear, cohesive, and accurate message to specific, locally-targeted audiences.
Change by Design was selected as the vendor for the project, with a goal of enabling the client’s regional affiliates to improve their communications efficacy. The primary behaviors to address included preventing specific common communication behaviors when the regional agencies interacted with the media, policy makers, and potential funders.
Five-Module Public Communications Curriculum Design
Our instructional designers completed research around the specific communication skills needed to advocate to the different stakeholders. Next, we designed the five-module curriculum, covering:
Communication 101 and “why you really wanna”
Communicating your message loud & clear
Engaging the media as a resource
Winning friendships and influencing policy
Appealing to the donor in us
The team then created a scenario-driven journey throughout the coursework. This helped to link both knowledge and skills together in a memorable way, so that learners would more readily and lastingly integrate what they learned into daily work.
Important Keys To Developing The Training’s Multi-layered Visual Approach
Because so much of the topical content surrounded teenagers and their relationships, the client approved a visual presentation including illustrative imagery that improved learner engagement, within an overall graphic novel aesthetic. Our art team identified a style for each of the modules, then illustrators went to work creating custom, hand-drawn characters, gestures, environments, and key moments depicted across each scenario.
Custom Training User Interface (UI)
Not only did the client commission custom artwork for scenarios, to supplement stock photography and graphics accompanying content, but they desired a custom training interface that would reflect their brand, color schemes and typography. In addition to these requirements, they wanted the UI to reflect a late-1990s retro internet style. And they also needed it to remain fairly consistent with their previous training products.
The art team incorporated all of these high-priority asks into a flexible solution, carefully weighing how shapes would be used to convey meaning and purpose throughout all five modules.
Interactive Avatars To Model the skills that learners should Perform
Yet another custom component that the client requested for the elearning trainings were character “guides.” Change by Design incorporated avatar-focused principles for learner roles in the scenarios, providing a more compelling experience.
Juan and Shantell were the two interactive, animated characters we developed to model behaviors for male and female learners throughout the five modules. They provided specific commentary and demonstration so that learners could see the skills in action before performing them in the training themselves.
Multi-year, Multi-state Collaboration
The multi-year project was memorable, requiring constant collaboration at both the national and regional levels between our teams, SMEs, funding decision-makers, and agency leadership. The elearning project management team considered this project to be by far, one of Change by Design’s most intensive efforts by all parts of our organization. But the quality that resulted by these efforts make it all worth while.
Contact Change by Design today if you need custom communications, sales, operations, or other workplace skills development training designed and developed, so that your non-profit can more effectively respond to crisis, attract more funding, and maintain consistent messaging on an enterprise scale.