Volunteer Orientation
This client project was created for a nonprofit called Dress for Success, Washington, D.C. The project was meant to transform a previously face-to-face, instructor-led training into a self-paced, eLearning course. (Used with permission.)
Audience: New Volunteers
Responsibilities: Instructional Design, Visual Design, eLearning Development
Tools Used: Articulate Rise 360, Techsmith Snagit
Experience the project demonstration by scrolling down below.
The Problem
Dress for Success, Washington D.C. is a nonprofit organization that has new volunteers joining on a rolling basis throughout the year. The organization would introduce the volunteers to the organization’s mission, the different departments, and the team during an orientation that was held in person on a quarterly basis.
This effort required a coordination of schedules and the organization of a face-to-face event, and it didn’t happen as often as the stakeholders would have liked. The volunteers were not able to start helping until they had been through the orientation.
Once the pandemic occurred, the orientations went virtual, but they still required the coordination of everyone’s schedules, and the orientations continued to take place less frequently than the stakeholders preferred.
The Solution
This led the organization to seek out instructional designers who could create self-paced versions of their existing ILT courses. At the top of their list of priorities was the Volunteer Orientation.
Since the organization did not have an existing Learning Management System, Rise 360, a web-based platform, was purchased to build and host the eLearning versions of the organization’s ILT courses.
Rise 360 ended up being the perfect solution as we could include pictures and videos of team members to serve as introductions, and encourage the learners to interact with the content via the tool’s many interactive options.
Click on the Play button above to experience the project demonstration.
My Process
Since the course was going to be a transformation of a face-to-face, instructor led course, and we were on an expedited timeline, we skipped action maps and storyboards, and went straight to outlining the course.
Setting Goals
The other volunteer ID and I reviewed the source material from the SMEs (a PowerPoint presentation and a two hour recording of the last virtual orientation). We then had a kickoff meeting with the stakeholders, during which we outlined the goals and objectives of the course. Finally, we roughly outlined the modules and obtained approval on the breakdown before sourcing the visual elements for the course.
Visual Design
Since one of the goals of the course was to introduce volunteers to the various team members and their departments, we decided on including pictures and video introductions of each team member to replace the live introductions that occurred during the face-to-face orientations. We used Snagit to cut clips of introductions from the recording of the last orientation and took images from the PowerPoint presentation. We worked with the stakeholders to define the brand colors, and the general theme for the stock images.
Rapid Prototypes
The course needed to built and functional within a short time period, so we took a rapid prototyping approach similar to the SAM model. We built out drafts of various modules and went through multiple rounds of feedback from stakeholders to develop the course further and make the interactions richer. We leveraged Rise blocks such as flashcard grids, tab interactions, sorting activities, multimedia, button stacks, and image carousels to create a truly interactive experience for the learner. Some of the interactions changed through the iterative process, as we honed in on what made sense for different types of content.
Full Development
Finally, after collecting and applying the feedback we received from the stakeholders, we put the finishing touches on the project. We worked on consistency in fonts, colors, alignment of text, and the overall user experience in the final iteration. We checked that all buttons and links were functional. We ensured that the course met all of the objectives we had outlined. And that the knowledge checks were aligned to those objectives. The stakeholders wanted the users to receive completion information and for the organization to have a way of tracking user completion data, so we worked on those items in the final stages.
Results and Takeaways
The final project was well-received by the stakeholders, who really enjoyed the interactions we had created and the ease with which the goals of the orientation were met without needing to hold a live event multiple times a year. The organization immediately began enrolling new volunteers into the course, and commissioned us to start working on their next course.
I had several takeaways from designing this course.
Problem-Solving: We were not given a design document with analysis data, or action maps, or a storyboard for this project. We did not have time to develop these items either. Despite these shortcomings, we managed to create a highly effective course that the client was happy with. The team did not have time to record introduction videos, so we lifted their introductions from the recording. The stakeholders did not have time to source images for us, so we found stock images and brand images that worked with our materials. We worked with the material we were given, within the timeline we were given, and the final product did not suffer because we solved whatever problems came our way.
Iteration, iteration, iteration: I had never worked on a course that did not have a design document or a storyboard before. Jumping right into development was kind of scary, but looking back, this was the right approach for this kind of project. We made the course better and better after each round of feedback. Multiple iterations kept the project aligned to stakeholder expectations, and kept the timeline short. I learned that it is possible to create a great product that meets the business goal through rapid prototyping.