Love Learning – January Report Card

Now we’ve completed our first full month of the campaign I can reflect a little on how Love Learning is going, what we need to do next and how it’s been received.

Let’s start with some stats for the month:

1350 – hits on the four new articles we wrote and published on the Intranet

900 – approximate number of UK employees

390 – hits on our Scoop.it topics

230 – hits on our Scoop.it topics coming from our employees (based on Scoop.it analytics)

40 – new items of curated content added to our Scoop.it topics

33 – attendees on our first lunch and learn webinar

6 – employees who now follow our topics on Scoop.it (this means they’ve created their own user accounts)

3 – employees who have joined our Love Learning Chatter group

What’s gone well?

We’re really happy with the number of hits on the intranet articles. The main introductory article got 650, so over two thirds of the company at least looked at it. Before the campaign the HR section of the intranet would often go months without any new content and it was apparently impossible to change the cheesy handshake feature image, which took up a quarter of the screen. Nothing is impossible, even in corporate comms.

Now we post at least one new article a week with it’s own feature image, each article is carefully curated, rich with links to other relevant content and permanent links to our Scoop.it pages, Chatter group and direct contact with the team.

We ran a very informal webinar session last Friday, publicised it via email and the intranet and got a really good response. Over 30 people attended to find out how they can use tools like Scoop.it, Zite, Flipboard and Google to make learning a part of their daily routine. The session was only scheduled for 30 minutes (it was Friday lunchtime), but half a dozen people stayed on for up to an hour to get support to set up their own Scoop.it accounts and ask questions. Several people came to the webinar because our new approach made them “confused and uncomfortable”. By the end of the session they understood what it is we are trying to achieve and they know they can get help and support whenever they need it. The best part was that this happened as a result of conversations between participants, not because of any big speeches from me.

Here’s my favourite outcome from one of the attendees at the session:

http://www.scoop.it/t/vocational-rehabilitation

This is a learning resource for her team and it could be a marketing resource for the business. We just showed them what Scoop.it does, they connected the dots.

What’s not gone so well?

If you look at the numbers the one at the bottom sticks out. This is disappointing, but not exactly surprising. I think it’s partly down to culture and partly down to systems.

Chatter is a decent enough enterprise social tool. However, we only use Chatter.com, the free version. This means people have to log on every time they want to use it and it means we have to create an account manually for every user. At the moment we have about 300 people on Chatter, I wouldn’t like to guess how many of them actually remember their passwords. The only active group is HR.

So what can we do to get more people involved? Why haven’t I gone out and invited everyone to join Chatter?

The short answer to those questions is “Sharepoint”.

Didn’t expect that now did you! Aside from Love learning there was another big internal launch in January – Business networking. This is based in Sharepoint 2010. If you compare the usability of Sharepoint with Chatter, there can only be one winner.

And yet Sharepoint does have some significant strengths over Chatter:

1. Single Sign On – It’s seamlessly integrated within our intranet. So you can link anyone to anything you post.

2. You can Blog – Chatter has a 1000 character limit. It’s designed for twitter style conversations, which are obviously useful, but then so are blogs.

3. Video – we have a new integrated video platform which means we can share rich content. Pretty handy when all video sites are blocked.

4. It’s the corporate choice – while I wouldn’t have chosen it myself, we will be expected to make a go of it. We have an opportunity to show the rest of the company exactly what you can do through communities of practice and collaboration and we can help to develop the platform.

We really need a working social community hub to make Love Learning self sustaining. At the moment we’re using work-arounds via the Intranet, but I’ve started work on a community site in Sharepoint to try to solve this.

It won’t be perfect, but it is the best option available at the moment.

So the next steps are to:

1. get a working version of the community site ready for people to play with
2. follow up on the webinar and keep momentum going
3. attend as many manager meetings as we can to spread the word face to face

Advertisement