Behind the Scenes: Building The Internal Comms Masterclass

Developing an online course or your very own Masterclass is a great initiative for your business. It can scale your expertise, grow your audience, increase sales, and build lasting authority by delivering real value. The caveat, however, is that developing quality learning content is expensive. That's why it's important to make sure you're on the right track before investing your time and money.

One of the most important steps is to validate your idea to ensure whether there is in fact a demand for the training you want to develop. Truly understanding your audiences' learning needs is the key ingredient that will secure your success. And that is exactly where we started with the Internal Comms Masterclass.

In our case, we started with data. We had survey results of over 2000 communicators across the globe, which was a great foundation to understand where communicators identified gaps to be successful in their roles. We also interviewed our key stakeholders to define the company's goals with the investment into the Masterclass.

The next step was to explore how best we could develop an MVP-version (minimal viable product) of an on-demand Masterclass, to ensure we were on the right path before developing the full series. We opted for a Youtube-first video based solution, well-structured videos exploring key topics in a digestible and enganging format. We worked with an professional presenter and after we had completed our first video, we uploaded it on Youtube and shared it with our network for feedback. The first lesson was very well received and we reached over 1000 views in the first week. Along with the great feedback, this gave us the certainty to invest in the full series.

We went on to develop a 13-video series for our Internal Comms Masterclass, covering 4 key areas that are part of the job of internal comms professionals: strategy, communication, engagement and optimization and reached over 52000 views.

This project was a great success and lead to the creation and investment in many future education-focussed projects that grew from the roots of this project. An outline of this project below:

Project: The Internal Comms Masterclass

Client & Industry

An employee communications software vendor with 2000+ customers across the globe.

The Challenge

The goal of this project was to position the company as an internal comms thought-leader, build brand authority, educate the market, drive product adoption, grow the community, and generate leads.

The Strategy

We leveraged existing survey results to identify key learning needs of our target audience and proceeded to build an MVP-lesson of the Masterclass. We launched it and collected feedback, which guided our next steps for further development.

The Solution

The Internal Comms Masterclass was launched as a 13-part Youtube video series, accompanied by a downloadable template collection. Video length was kept to 5-10 minutes, topic choice was based on data collected and 3 key concepts were introduced in each video. The videos were a mix between live presentation and animated infographics to support understanding of concepts. We ensured each video contained practical guidance on how to start implementing these concepts. Finally, the Masterclass was accompanied a template collection to further help our learners bring their learnings into their work.

The Outcome

The Youtube Series "The Internal Comms Masterclass" was a great success and reached over 52,000 views on Youtube. Surveys showed that learners rated the series 8.5-9/10. They shared that the classes provided clear and actionable learnings in an accessible and digestible format. After all episodes were released, we promoted the full series with a launch webinar that had some of the highest attendance we saw for webinars that year.

This great overall success lead to the development of further initiatives around Internal Comms education, such as an E-mail course, and eventually a full-blown Internal Comms Online Academy with many courses and certifications in German and English. The Masterclass received a MarCom and a Viddy Award for excellence in communications education.

Follow the links below to see the outcome:
1. Creating Powerful Messages for Internal Communications
2. How to Master Internal Comms Planning
3. Full Playlist

If you are considering to develop your very own Masterclass or online course, you have an exciting journey ahead of you. There are a few very important steps to ensure that you invest your time and resources well when it comes to these kinds of projects, as they can become costly and miss the mark of providing real educational value. We'd be happy to help you get started, either by advising you on your project, or collaborating with you to develop your course. You can book a session with our team to learn more about the process and discuss your project.

Want to build your own? Reach out to our team to get started.