Building a learning strategy: Do you have one?

Remi is the Manager of the Financial Literacy Program at her nonprofit and has been in the role for eight years. She knows every workshop, every toolkit, every handout her program has ever produced, and she knows exactly how hard her trainer Dale works. He is the one in the room, every time, and he is great at what he does. Participants leave his sessions feeling more capable and confident.

But the organization wants more reach, more communities, further away, without the travel budget to match. And then the message arrives from her director: We need to move the Financial Literacy Program to the new learning platform. Can you make that happen?

No budget discussion. No timeline conversation. No acknowledgment of what making that happen actually involves. Just an assumption that because the platform exists, the rest is details.

Overwhelmed, Remi closes her laptop and goes for a walk. The fresh air clears her head, and the problem becomes obvious. The platform is ready. The content isn't.

Back at work, she opens the shared drive. She sees the Word document titled Facilitator_Guide_Final.2023 that Dale knows by heart, the 100-slide PowerPoint from 2022 that also serves as a participant guide, and a series of articles and PDF toolkits posted on their website as "Educational Resources."

Uploading these as-is won't reach their community, and it certainly won't serve them. It's content that was never designed for online learning and certainly not accessible to the people who need it most. But rebuilding everything from scratch with no budget and a trainer who has never done this before isn't the answer either.

So, Remi does something that feels almost irresponsible given the pressure she's under. She pauses, opens her notebook, and writes one question at the top of the page.

Why does this content exist?

Not what it covers. Why it exists. What behaviour was it built to change, and whether the need it was built for is still the right need today. And then the harder question: does this all connect to where the organization is headed, or has the content just been accumulating while the strategy moved on without it?

She thinks about the last time her team did a real audit of their organization's learning and education resources. She's honestly not sure they ever have. And she realizes that before anything goes online, she needs a learning strategy; a clear plan that connects what her community needs to learn, what her organization is trying to achieve, and how her content can get them there.

Sound familiar? Does your program have a learning strategy?

Next up: Remi starts building a learning strategy