by Rich Finstein | Jan 28, 2019 | Blog, Customer Stories, Education
When organizations consider holding a livestream program from a place based conference or a completely virtual event, a common question asked is, what content will be compelling enough to get people to pay attention?
Click to view the livestream.
Several weeks ago CommPartners was asked to livestream a session for the Council of Manufacturing Associations (CMA) in cooperation with the American Society of Association Executives titled: Unconscious Bias: An Association’s Role in Social Issues. The program originated from CMA’s Winter Leadership Conference that took place at the Four Seasons in Baltimore, MD, on Friday January 11, 2019. The archive of that event can be accessed here.
Of all the possible topics to livestream, CMA chose this subject because they knew, organizations are wrestling with their role in today’s political and social discourse. It’s a topic that transcends professional development training and presents an opportunity for community conversation and engagement. CommPartners’ role was to bring this session to the remote audience and to make them feel as if they were onsite and provide opportunities to share thoughts and ideas.
Taking risks and considering alternative formats for livestream programs can position your organization to extend your reach and impact. It can place you at the center of important conversations we are all having.
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As a result of using the livestream format for a more personal and compelling topic, CMA was able to realize five key benefits:
- They greatly increased their profile to individuals and groups who otherwise would not be aware or involved with the CMA.
- Attending an onsite conference is expensive. By offering a session like this one, they were more inclusive and recognized the importance of reaching out to those who could not afford to attend or didn’t have the ability to travel or leave their homes or offices.
- CMA, along with ASAE took the lead in forging the conversation around hidden social bias. They showed who they are and what they are about by addressing the topic in public way. This showed is pays to be bold.
- This was a session from the heart. Online attendees were touched by the format and conversation.
- The session used a dramatic delivery that worked well to engage those in the room as well as those online. You had to walk away with a wow feeling as you watched the event. It’s the type of session that creates interest and a positive feeling about the host organization. If you are a member, it solidified your feelings about your investment. If you aren’t a member and this was your first experience, you had to walk away impressed.
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This program was a collaboration between CommPartners, Council of Manufacturing Associations and the American Society of Association Executives. It was an important topic that has relevance to the greater association community. As the production company, we were proud to help extend the reach of this session to online viewers around the country.
For additional information about CommPartners Elevate platform integrated with Higher Logic Communities, contact Meghan Gowen at mgowen@commpartners.com
by Rich Finstein | Dec 21, 2018 | Blog
As 2018 winds down, all of us at CommPartners want to express our gratitude to our clients, partners and extended community for your collaboration and friendship over the past year. This was our 25th year in business. Where has the time gone? It’s been fun to look back and see how technology and online learning has changed and how our company and all of us individually have evolved. We’re proud of our history and our evolution as an organization. We feel fortunate to work with so many wonderful clients over many years. These relationships make our jobs so enjoyable and rewarding. We are extremely blessed!
Recently Barbara Bouton, Vice President, Professional Development from the National Hospice and Palliative Care Association provided us the following quote:
I truly think CommPartners is the best company I’ve had the privilege to work with in my career. I value each of you and am proud of the work we’ve accomplished together – especially the innovations!
What Barbara said reinforced our sense that what’s most important is the relationship between our team and our client’s staff and the commitment to stick together to seize opportunities and meet whatever challenges arise.
So as we celebrate 2018, we take pride in our clients’ success and all you have accomplished through your education initiatives.
The Year’s Highlights
- We celebrated five years since Elevate LMS was developed. It takes this period of time for a SaaS solution to fulfill the promise you envision when it’s first created. This year we experienced over 100% growth in new client placements. We are thrilled to welcome so many new organizations into the CP Family.
- We had our first user conference in 2018 that occurred in the spring in Washington DC. The conference included keynote and breakout sessions, trainings, one on one consultation and exhibits. Thank you to our presenters, partners and attendees for making this event a success.
- We established our Advisory Board to receive feedback on new ideas and development and provide clients an active voice as we move forward.
- We created a new administrative portal in Elevate that makes creating, managing and tracking education programs simple, fast and convenient. Our team was determined to support our clients with the most intuitive and user friendly admin available.
- EventCenter our proprietary webcast software was redeveloped with a new design, attendance checks, interactive features, high quality VOIP and enhanced multimedia.
- Our Higher Logic Partnership continued to evolve allowing our mutual clients to bring together community and learning in a unified presence. We are now building the next generation of our integration to support further engagement and bring together content from thought leaders and peer sharing of ideas.
- We established a partnership with BadgeCert to seamlessly provide and assign digital badges from learning activities in Elevate. We feel this will be an important to benefit to our clients as they incorporate digital credentials into their education offerings.
- The National Credentialing Institute was unveiled by our friends at Limitless Association Resources. CommPartners will be hosting this new site which is created to provide associations with assessment-based, professional development based on industry best practice for current and emerging industry professionals.
- We created our own community called CommPartners Connect. It supports the opportunity to collaborate around important topics in online learning and events.
- We welcomed five new staff members to the CP Team.
CommPartners’ first client 25 years was the National Association of Home Builders. This year NAHB selected CommPartners and our Elevate platform for their LMS. We’re grateful to reestablish our partnership with NAHB and all of our clients who continued to depend on us to support their online learning and events.
May each of you be blessed with good health and happiness in the New Year.
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by Rich Finstein | Nov 6, 2018 | Blog
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Online communities have become a valuable component of an organization’s engagement strategy. According to the advisory firm IDC, the online community market will reach $1.2 billion dollars by 2019. A University of Michigan study found that customers / members spent 19 per cent more after joining a company’s online community.
Paralleling the growth of online communities is the expansion of the virtual event market. Virtual events include virtual conferences, virtual trade fairs, livestream programs, webcasts and live courses. Market Research Media states, this market will grow from $14 billion annually in 2018 to $18 Billion annually in 2023.
Online communities and virtual events bring people together to exchange ideas, network and learn. Since they basically do similar things, there are advantages to connect these two offerings to provide greater participation and engagement. The premise is based on the knowledge that participants are already psychologically committed to their community. They established their picture and profile, have made connections and are accessing resources. In integrating and offering virtual events, participants can continue to use current features. Support for registration and access will be in place.
Integration of community and virtual events is now possible through Higher Logic’s integration with a virtual conference site through CommPartners’ Elevate Platform.
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Here are five reasons to consider folding in your virtual events through your community:
- Positioning virtual events as an added resource to current engagement vs a separate offering will increase the likelihood someone will register. A trust has been established and participants have already bought in to the value they are receiving.
- Attendees can use their picture and profile that’s already established in the community for each event.
- Adding virtual events will nurture greater commitment and participation in the community.
- Attendee participation in virtual events will be counted in the community’s reporting of individual and overall engagement including the rewarding of ribbons and badges.
- Conversations that begin in an event can seamlessly evolve once the event is over.
There is a belief that sharing of knowledge that occurs through a community, an LMS or virtual events should not be segmented and separate. If we can have these resource integrated and seamless, both the learner and organization will benefit.
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For additional information about CommPartners Elevate platform integrated with Higher Logic Communities, contact Meghan Gowen at mgowen@commpartners.com
by Rich Finstein | Aug 23, 2018 | Blog
It’s hard to believe that the TV show, Cheers, had its last year on air in 1993, which is actually the year CommPartners was founded. People remember that Cheers, the name of the bar in the show, was a welcoming place because everyone knew your name when you walked in. People felt they belonged. They were recognized and appreciated.
So what does Cheers have to do with an LMS? It’s rather simple. When we invest our time and energy when accessing an organization’s LMS, we want to be recognized and provided relevant opportunities to our interests and education needs. Associations, as well as other types of organizations, know quite a bit about their learners. Just like people that walk into their friendly neighborhood tavern, it’s important to offer a welcoming environment that becomes the go-to place for our stakeholder’s online education needs.
So how can you create your LMS be to be the Cheers of online learning? With Elevate LMS, we strive to enable our clients to be their communities’ favorite learning destination. Here are five ways that we support the Cheers approach:
Elevate Relevancy Engine: When learners first log into Elevate, they are able to select their interests and “likes.” On future visits, Elevate recognizes the learner and presents programs of interest to them.
AMS / Community Integrations: We think of integrations as functional processes to connect two or more platforms. With Elevate, integrations provide additional value. It allows organizations to decide which content should be seen by which stakeholder. If it’s not relevant, why show it and clutter the experience? Pricing by learner type can also be automatically established.
Roles: In addition to member type, Elevate can further delineate who a learner is based on their role within the organization or other designations, such as a practice group. Roles also determine pricing and access.
Private Branding: Private branding can be unique for groups of learners from organizations. Seeing the unique design reinforces the relationship between you and your client.
Automatic Triggers: Like frequent flyer miles, automatic triggers assign credits based on rules that are established, such as a member renewing their membership.
All of these benefits provide a way of saying – I know who you are and based on your role or interests, we are providing you learning engagement opportunities that are just for you. In other words, this a place where you feel welcomed and have a relevant, individualized experience.
It’s the place where we know your name.
If you would like more information Elevate LMS, give us a call at (800) 274-9390 or fill out our online contact form to get in touch with someone.
by Rich Finstein | May 7, 2018 | Blog
When an organization begins the process of evaluating LMS options, they typically will start by developing a list of features that should be included. Confirming this list helps to identify ideal candidates. While the feature set is critical to narrow an organization’s search process, often an element that is overlooked, at least initially, is the User Experience or “UX”.
The UX as defined in Wikipedia refers to: “A person’s emotions and attitudes about using a particular product, system or service. It includes the practical, experiential, affective, meaningful and valuable aspects of human–computer interaction and product ownership.”
So much of what we do today is defined by the user experience. An impactful example is the mobile device we interact with hundreds of times a day. UX design also applies to mundane products such as a coffee cup or the toothbrush we use. But how about interacting with an LMS? If we want to ensure that learners have an excellent experience when accessing education opportunities, it’s critical to make sure that every element of our learning management site is attractively designed, intuitive to navigate, is relevant and meaningful.
Here are five recommendations to ensure your Learning Management System fulfills your learners’ expectation of an exceptional user experience:
- Choose an LMS that provides complete control of every aspect of the design.
You have invested in the development of your website to ensure it presents your organization in the best possible way. You most likely do not want to implement an LMS that feels like a separate component. Ideally your learning site will be nimble enough to incorporate your website styling, navigation, layout, imagery, fonts and taxonomy. Having an LMS with visual congruence to your website will eliminate a disconnect of having two separately hosted online components.
- Ensure that your LMS works seamlessly with your ecosystem of applications including your AMS (database) and private online community.
When a learner moves to and from your LMS, does the experience feel disjointed? It is important to provide visual congruence through your entire ecosystem of web platforms so the user experience will be not be compromised. In addition, it is important to integrate with these systems to ensure login credentials are carried through all applications. This will create seamless navigation and enhance the overall experience.
- Establish a style guide to be applied throughout your site.
It’s important to have a set style guide that addresses every design element of your LMS. This applies to both the platform and contents. Choose a platform that provides you design flexibility for all elements. Make sure that your staff or anyone that works with your LMS adheres to your guidelines. It shows when certain elements do not adhere to the standards you have set, therefore compromising the User Experience.
- Create a relevant and simple process for accessing content.
Ideally the LMS experience can be personalized for each learner so when they login in, they are presented content that is relevant to their needs. This can be done in multiple ways. The first is using information you already know about a learner and presenting the right access, pricing and topics. A second way to is to allow the user to set their interests and prioritize the presentation of content based on those interests. Having customized experiences fosters loyalty and return visits to your site. To support simple access of content, avoid scrolling to find programs. Instead, provide the right amount of content per screen.
- Make registration and checkout clean and simple.
Ideally, in a matter of a click or two the learner will be able to register and access their selected program. When they land on the shopping cart page, it should be clean and simple. Once the registration is completed, the learner is seamlessly directed to the content that they register for. When the User Experience is exceptional, the exposure and value of your learning programs is increased. The UX represents you in a highly public way and it’s important to ensure it positions your organization for success.
If you would like more information on UX Design for your LMS or the CommPartners Elevate LMS, give us a call at (800) 274-9390 or fill out our online contact form to get in touch with someone.
