Building an Award-Winning Online Academy

Over the last 10 years, online learning has become one of the fastest growing markets in the education and technology landscape. Learning, knowledge and information about virtually any topic can now be found compiled into digital courses, accessible on-demand, anywhere, at any time.

Many software companies, particularly those selling complex solutions, have understood that having a dedicated online academy boasts advantages for customers, partners, and employees. Creating tailored and targeted learning within a well-designed academy allows businesses to educate at scale, standing out as true experts in their field. Academies and dedicated training experiences can nurture long-term relationships with your learners, strengthen brand credibility, improve product adoption, and reduce support costs. They have also become a competitive advantage over other providers for many SaaS businesses.

Whether your goal is to build thought leadership courses, enable customers on your products, upskill your workforce, or offer training to your partners, an academy provides a sustainable, high-value channel to do exactly that.

A recent project I had the pleasure of working on was to design and build the first online academy for internal communications professionals, to offer strategic guidance, practical skills, and a trusted partner to grow with.

Project: Internal Communications Academy

Client & Industry

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

The Challenge

Position the company as a trusted expert and reduce cost by providing engaging, high-value, and scalable training to educate customers, partners, and employees on the value of strategic internal communication, to adopt the product faster, reduce support, and achieve better outcomes.

The Strategy

Our approach was to leverage an existing maturity model as the foundation for the curriculum. We built a team of creatives and learning designers, developed the materials, assessments, the brand, and worked closely with internal and exteral subject matter experts to deliver state-of-the-art multimedia training.

The Solution

Staffbase Campus was launched as a self-paced, on-demand online learning platform, featuring 20+ courses and certifications for internal communications professionals, available in English and German. The curriculum was based on insights from over 1000 top companies and featured many prominent voices of the internal comms industry.

The courses covered strategic communications and product training. Training materials consisted of videos, GIFs, animations, quizzes, case studies, downloadable materials, expert interviews, assessments, badges, and certificates.

The Outcome

3,000+ learners and 10,000+ certifications in the first two years, high training satisfaction, rated 8.5-9/10. Reduced onboarding time and fewer live training hours, resulting in significant cost savings. The academy received MarCom and Viddy Awards for excellence in communications education and the academy has a loyal and active community of internal communicators eager to learn, grow, and engage. If you'd like to see it in action, you can sign up here.

If you are considering to launch your own online academy or training, you're in for an exciting journey! These project are highly complex and can be expensive, therefore it's of the utmost importance to have a good strategy in place that is tailored to your business, audience, and objectives. When executed well, it creates lasting impact, strengthens your brand, and develops real expertise among your customers and community. We'd be happy to help you on your endeavour, 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.