The Learn-a-thon: How to plan a global learning event for 900+ to share knowledge and connect (DIY)

??? TLDR Summary: Learn-a-thon is a "Hack-a-thon-like" event that connects colleagues together to learn and share knowledge in technical, personal, and professional topics. It is founded on the idea that there is a wealth of hidden knowledge and expertise within an organization—how can we showcase that talent, promote learning, and foster social connection at the same time?

We launched the first-ever Learn-a-thon at Irdeto on January 22, 2021 with 30 colleagues teaching 35 different personal, professional, and technical classes to over colleagues from 15 countries with sessions ranging from ???? Making French Crepes with a Frenchmen to ?? Business Valuation 101 with an ex-CFO to ?? Intercultural Communication with Yours Truly.

• Why & Who? Organizations (L&D, HR) who want to connect colleagues to learn & share knowledge
• Where & When? Virtual, any time
• Cost? Free (internal talent + resources)
• ?How? Keep reading

?? Warning: The following is a 2,339 words how-to guide. Reader discretion is advised. ??

---

?? Introduction

How do you plan a $40,000 virtual learning event for a 900+ persons global company using only internal talent & resources?

Our L&D team wanted to throw a one-day learning event to connect colleagues around the world to share and learn from one another during COVID-19. The challenge? Well...$40,000. We did however have something that was priceless—our internal talent. A former CFO who could teach business fundamentals. LinkedIn tips & tricks from our Head of Marketing. Cybersecurity veterans, Social media gurus, Well-being champions, Excel savants...and many more.

This is a story of how partnering with the right people, leveraging our unique strengths, and thinking like scientists helped us connect our colleagues on one day to teach, share knowledge, and learn from one another.

?? Step 1 - Plan It:

"Begin with the end in mind." -Stephen Covey

Our journey begins in early 2020 with a vision by our ex-head of L&D, Chris Webb, to connect global talent and knowledge...then COVID hit. With many parts of the world cooped up at home and with global mental health taking a plunge due to COVID-19, our L&D team asked the question...

How can we bring together a global company to connect, share, and learn during a time of crisis?

While COVID-19 had disrupted traditional methods of both work and learning, it also presented an unforeseen opportunity for us to truly connect a global audience together to learn—The Learn-a-thon. Ania (my colleague) and I decided to take up the challenge to bring this to life...

How can we leverage our unique and complementary strengths?

From the start, we understood we needed to capitalize on our unique experiences and complementary strengths to make this work. She is an experienced event planner, a positive idea generator, and a natural at getting people together. I’m a natural thinker with experience in strategic planning, systems thinking, and project management.

Ania could excel on the frontlines getting buy-in from stakeholders while communicating the vision and bringing a team together from around the organization. I could focus more on the “how” behind the design and systems of the actual Learn-a-thon. And we would work together on execution—Ania started a project plan, I opened a document to start brainstorming, and we began our search for Learning Champions...

Forming the Team

"Efforts that don’t have a powerful enough guiding coalition can make apparent progress for a while. But, sooner or later, the opposition gathers itself together and stops the change." - Harvard Business School Professor, John Kotter

If there was one big takeaway from my Change Management class at Maastricht University, it was HBS Professor John Kotter’s 8-Step Change Model to effectively influence change. Step #2 was the importance of creating a powerful team to help you spread the vision and the message to influence change—our “Learning Champions." Through a series of meetings, emails, and countless Slack & Zoom messages, we were able to form a wide-ranging team of learning champions:

• Project Team (Ania & David) AKA the “Project Managers”
• Learning & Development and HR AKA the “Original Champions”
• Regional Champions & CSR Education AKA the "Regional Ambassadors" (Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa)
• Executives AKA “The Sponsors” AKA "Nothing is going down without their Go"
• Teachers AKA colleagues who volunteered to teach and share knowledge
• Marketing AKA the “Company Storytellers”
• Feedback Givers AKA the "Fail Prevention Team" who tested prototypes and provided feedback (communication, sign-ups, schedule)

Once we had a concrete project plan and champions on board, we almost forgot to ask our most important stakeholder—the Executives…

?? Learnings: At the beginning, it’s a good idea to align strengths, interests, and experiences on projects to make sure you have the right people doing the right things. Which parts could you excel in based on your unique strengths and experiences? What do you want to do? And it's important to engage your champions from the beginning.

?? Step 2 - "Sell It"

"Leadership is about taking care of those in your charge." Simon Sinek

Duh! Of course, we needed to get Executive buy-in...how could we just assume we could walk in and ask the entire company to stop work for a day just to bake cookies while learning to create Excel Pivot Tables and sipping French wine?

We needed the support from the people at the top—without their permission, there would be no Learn-a-thon. And ultimately, they would be one of our biggest learning champions (along with 3 teachers).

While getting this on their agenda took time and patience, we were well-prepared, and Ania pitched the idea with some PowerPoint magic that eventually led to a green light. Not only do organizations realize the importance of lifelong learning in the 21st century, but COVID-19 has shined a bright light on the importance of well-being and connecting people together. It was now time to design the Learn-a-thon—we now had a mission of not only connecting knowledge together but connecting people together during a time of crisis...

?? Learnings: The “Influencing” phase takes way longer than expected but is absolutely critical—you need to take the time and effort to build the right relationships and get the right people on board for flight to truly take off.

?? Step 3 - Design It

"Success occurs when opportunity meets preparation." - Zig Ziglar

What would success look like? How could we design the experience for ease, simplicity, and joy? What could go wrong and how could we prevent that?

We had just attended a paid virtual conference not long ago as a team, and we definitely did not have the technical nor monetary resources to build a fancy "virtual conference.” While the virtual conference brought a “wow” factor, the user experience was at times complicated, and I had trouble finding and signing up for classes. We did however have...Microsoft Office365. Not the sexiest—but it was simple, easy, and already embedded in our company’s workflow. And people like simple and easy. 

The Design:

• Microsoft Excel for global schedule (class names, descriptions, teachers, time zones, and sign-up links)
• Microsoft Forms for sign-ups
• Zoom for virtual, classroom delivery
• Microsoft OneDrive & Word for organization (global schedule, sign-ups, communication, planning)
• Microsoft Stream for class recordings
• Microsoft Outlook for calendar invites (teachers in charge of class invites)
• Outlook/Yammer/Slack/WhatsApp/WeChat/Company Magazine for communication & collaboration

In December of 2020, we sent a global email to formally announce the Learn-a-thon with a call for teacher sign-ups (2-week window) using Microsoft Forms, which landed us 30 colleagues who wanted to teach 35 different classes in technical, personal, and professional topics. Once we had our teachers, we created a global schedule using Microsoft Excel along with unique sign-up forms per each class. The global schedule was ready, communication proofread, and we were ready to launch but...

?? THE PRE-MORTEM

“You only get one shot, do not miss your chance to blow...This opportunity comes once in a lifetime.” - Eminem

What could go wrong and how could we possibly solve for that beforehand?

Conducting pre-mortems has been one of my favorite exercises in both my professional and personal life. A pre-mortem is an exercise where you imagine that the project has failed and work backwards to remedy such threats, and studies show that pre-mortems help reduce team overconfidence and increase likelihood of success.

We identified the most likely cause of potential failure would be technical issues with the schedule and sign-ups. This was flagged as “HIGH RISK," and we decided to design alternative solutions to mitigate this risk.

For example, we originally intended to share one view-only Excel online link in case we needed to make last-minute changes. However, we also anticipated potential bandwidth issues if hundreds of people were accessing it at the same time. To mitigate this risk, we decided to share two options to access the schedule—(1) a link to an online Excel sheet and (2) a separate attached Excel schedule. And we were glad we did because we did get reports of bandwidth issues accessing the online Excel sheet on the day of.

Thinking like Scientists would help prevent any failures, but now we needed to think like Marketers...

?? Learnings: Go for ease and simplicity. While we may think the shiniest option may be best—in reality, humans just want ease and simplicity. Change management is not a game you want to play if you don’t need to. Think about doing a pre-mortem—while it takes time, it can help prevent potential mishaps and failures. 

?? Step 4 - Promote It

"Succeeding in business is all about making connections." - Richard Branson

How do you generate buzz?

This is where the power of relationships can determine the success or failure of an event. While we had the power of a global email, we also realized many people don’t always check email (according to our engineers). This is where our learning champions came to play a pivotal role. 

To truly generate buzz, we came up with a multi-pronged marketing strategy that leveraged the power of these champions from different parts and regions of the business. The connectors. The regional influencers. Following the global launch on January 4th, these learning champions helped spread the buzz to all the different, localized communication platforms ranging from WhatsApp to WeChat to MS Teams to Slack. 

The Marketing team helped design the logo, brainstorm marketing tactics, and spread the message in our monthly company magazine. Our CSR Education group passed the message to their respective internal social networks. Our greater HR team continued to spread the buzz throughout the organization. And we promoted the Learn-a-thon during every chance we had including Onboarding Days, L&D Meet & Greets, our Yammer page, a promotional Learn-a-thon video, and a Microsoft Stream channel to house the session recordings.

With the support of over 40+ internal learning champions, we were able to achieve 775 total sign-ups for the Learn-a-thon...

?? Learnings: Relationships matter. People matter. They are pivotal to the success of any team, any organization, and any event. It’s always a good idea to build and maintain good relationships early on—they can truly help you move mountains and inspire the masses.

?? Step 5 - Do It

"Just do it." - Nike

Game time. The Learn-a-thon had kicked off in Beijing during the early AM hours here in Amsterdam, and we woke up to a message from Teacher Mike in Beijing that his class had gone smoothly. Whew...

The day went by in a blur, as I facilitated two workshops of “Understanding Cultural Differences in the Workplace" that sparked some ah-has for quite a few. At the end of the day, while there were minor hiccups like people not showing up to sessions, nothing broke. Our planning and pre-mortem paid off to help prevent any potential disasters. People forwarded invites to others, and we will never know the true total participation number... 

But it was finally a wrap—a veil of burden slowly started dissolving away, I called my team, poured myself two shots of amaretto on the rocks, and cheered to the freakin' weekend...

?? Learnings: People just want to connect. Whether it’s learning a new skill or connecting with colleagues, there’s a huge power in bringing people together. There's also a treasure chest of priceless talent and knowledge hiding in your workforce...waiting to be discovered.

?? Step 6 - Reflect on It

While the Learn-a-thon was over, we still needed to analyze feedback and learn from the experience—the reflection phase is actually one of the most effective forms of learning. Next, we scheduled a 1-hour retrospective to discuss the results including what went well and what could be improved...

What went well?

• Connected a global company globally across 15 countries amidst a pandemic generating almost 800 sign-ups for a diverse range of classes taught by 30 internal teachers
• Showcased internal talent and gave employees the opportunities to share their passions and improve teaching and facilitation skills
• Leveraged only internal and existing resources resulting in zero cost to company

Improvements?

• Spread it across a few days instead of one day
• Simplify and automate the logistics (eg. scheduling and sign-ups)

My Big 3 Takeaways:

1. Knowledge Sharing — there is a wealth of knowledge already present in your organization. Seek it. Uncover it. Share it.
2. Connection — more important than ever. Social connection has been shown to improve overall well-being and stress. Always a good reminder to connect with colleagues, friends, and family.
3. Simplicity — Go for simple and easy. Whether it's in your design or your communication, go for simple and easy.

2021 will likely end on a very different note and with the world transitioning towards a hybrid physical-digital work environment, the big question for the next Learn-a-thon is…

How will we conduct a Learn-a-thon in a hybrid working world?

Resources for You

• Sign-up and Evaluation Forms (Teacher, Participant, and Evaluation Survey)
• Global Schedule (Excel/Google Sheets)

--

Hi, I'm David ?? I’m currently a Learning & Development professional at Irdeto, and I help people develop in their professional and personal journeys. My background bridges people development, HR, user experience, finance, and strategic planning with companies ranging from Universal Studios to KPMG to Apple and Amazon. Please reach out and say hello!