How to create an effective campaign in Yarno

Pre-campaign

Our vision is to help staff perform better. And we believe continuous learning via daily quizzes is a fantastic way to achieve this. 

Creating Yarno campaigns that inspire long-lasting impact requires deliberate thought and planning. It’s easy to add questions to a campaign and launch it in Yarno (naturally - we made it that way!). However, we know from experience that the most successful campaigns rely on a bit of upfront planning. 

Discovery workshop

We start every campaign by understanding the business need that Yarno will be solving. We’ll facilitate a workshop that seeks to answer the following questions, to elicit this need:

• What's the business need that's driving the use of Yarno?
• What's the impact of the need or challenge currently? How widespread and frequent is it?
• What's the $ value of the need or challenge?
• How will we know when we've solved it? 
• What will learners DO differently as a result of Yarno? 

Then we define how success will be measured. Ideally, this ties into KPIs that the business already reports on. We use the Specific Measurable Achievable Realistic and Timely (SMART) framework to ensure that the metrics defined can be measured and are realistic. 

Next, we define learning objectives for the campaign. Learning objectives communicate the expected goals to all stakeholders. A learning objective states what a learner should be able to do at the end of the training. Ideally, these are behaviours observable in the workplace. 

We spend time understanding the target audience for the learning. We ask questions such as:

• What functions are they performing day-to-day?
• What are their KPIs? 
• What challenges do they face in achieving their KPIs? 
• What are the representative demographics?
• How does management communicate with them currently? 
• How will they interact with Yarno? 

Communications plan

Once we understand what we’re trying to achieve with the campaign, how success will be measured and who the learners are, we start writing a communication plan that outlines how we’ll communicate with them. 

Typically we split this into two; learners and managers. It’s critical that both learners and managers understand what Yarno is, why it’s being rolled out and what the benefits are. We need their buy-in for the campaign to be a success. The learning objectives are used here to communicate learning outcomes. 

We also know that manager involvement is critical to the success of any learning intervention. Learners need to feel supported by their manager and given the time to complete Yarno each day. 

Past communication methods for customers have included; webinars, teaser emails, flyers and in-person presentations. 

Further reading

• Why manager involvement is crucial for workplace learning

Content creation

Writing great questions and answers isn’t rocket science, but it is a skill.

To write multiple choice questions that reinforce and expand knowledge, and mould behaviour you can come at a subject from three ways:

1. Quiz the why: why is it essential for your staff to know or do something?
2. Quiz the process: how specifically is something done? Or what are the details of the idea?
3. Quiz the consequence: what are the ramifications of doing or not doing something, or knowing or not knowing something?

We begin by writing draft question ideas down that relate to your learning objectives. It’s likely there will be more than one person involved in creating the question content. So we use a free online tool called Trello to do this since it makes collaboration easy. Or you could use an Excel spreadsheet.

We then begin to group questions into “topics” with you. We recommend 5-10 topics for a campaign. Any more than this and we’d suggest splitting the content out into a second campaign. 

From experience, we’ve found it’s imperative for Subject Matter Experts to review questions and answers before campaign launch. This ensures the integrity and accuracy of the Yarno content. 

Once your campaign is ready, you can get started with adding questions, learners and other content into Yarno. For more information on this, please check out this helpful video we prepared: 

Further reading

• Our secret formula for writing (effective) multiple choice quizzes
• Why your multiple choice questions suck and how to fix them
• 4 learning principles that drive Yarno

Campaign launch

Once the campaign is underway it’s important that learners know who to contact should they have questions or need support.

We have an online support portal at support.yarno.com.au, with a knowledge base of FAQs and email and phone contact details. We pride ourselves on offering a high level of customer support since we want learners to have the best experience possible. 

Learners can also give feedback and contact support from any screen within the application. 

Real-time results are available at any time via the campaign dashboard in your Yarno account. We encourage you to check this regularly to see how your questions and learners are performing. Each learner has access to their unique dashboard too. 

Post-campaign

Once the campaign has finished we come together as a team to review; the results against our original goals and success measures, and any learner or manager feedback.

Our ultimate goal is to inform future campaigns and learning interventions. Ensuring that future training investment focuses on areas identified as having the most significant need. 

Timeline

• Pre-campaign and content creation - 4 - 6 weeks
• Campaign - 3 -8 weeks (the number of questions determines length)
• Post-campaign - 2 weeks

If you have any questions feel free to contact Lachy Gray, Head of Product. Contact Lachy at lachy@yarno.com.au and 0408 131 177.