A leading consulting company, Realize Solutions, hired Spark + Co. to develop non profit training courses to provide an affordable option for some of its non profit clients to address organizational challenges the sector faces. The final product of on-demand non profit management courses complements Realize Solutions consulting services, creates more value for their clients, and provides a D-I-Y option for clients who cannot afford consulting engagements.
“I learned so much in this course. I will kick up our communications by a few more notches, including more information about our business strategy with employees to help them have a better understanding of where the business is going and how they play a vital role in our growth.”
Terry S – Operations Coordinator after taking one of the non profit training courses
Realize Solutions
Realize Solutions is a certified B Corp. For over 20 years, Realize Solutions has been helping organizations implement powerful, people-centered leadership, strategy, and governance solutions to complex challenges. They help for-profit businesses align with their purpose, give back to their community, and empower purpose-driven non-profits to generate sustainable sources of revenue to fulfill their mission.
Through their work, they noticed a lack of quality non profit training, particularly non profit management courses available in a convenient and easily digestible format for a modest cost.
Problems Faced By Non Profit Organizations
Non profits face a range of organizational challenges, including
- Strategic planning
- Funding and Financial Sustainability
- Governance
- Staff and Volunteer Recruitment and Management
- Technology integration
- Change Management
Often, addressing these organizational-wide challenges requires specialist expertise. While Realize Solutions possesses the necessary knowledge to solve these challenges, they wanted to offer their expertise via on-demand non profit management courses to financially constrained organizations that couldn’t yet engage these services.
The Non Profit Training Solution
Realize Solutions engaged Spark + Co. to work collaboratively to develop a low-cost solution for these organizations. The original outline was to create a mini-MBA to help educate, train, and provide the tools to prepare non profit managers to tackle these large organizational challenges. However, after conducting market research, we found there existed non profit training for
- very generic online courses
- professional development courses for individual’s career progression, and
- cohort-based live workshops
But there was a large gap. There were no affordable, practical, on-demand non profit management courses focused on tackling these organizational challenges.
Constraints In Developing On-Demand Non Profit Training
In designing any training program, we have to work within constraints. There were three main constraints to developing this non profit training.
Ensuring The Training Was Practical For Challenges Faced By Non Profits
Some of the topics within the courses had conceptual elements. But our market research had shown that people didn’t want another generic leadership course. So, a lot of effort went into identifying and focusing the content on real organizational challenges within the non profit sector to ensure they were as practical as possible.
Course Shelf-life
All courses require some refreshing and updating periodically. However, we wanted to ensure these non profit management courses had a modern approach and a long shelf-life. So, while the course examples were very specific, we avoided referring to particular dates and trends.
Resource Constraints
There were two primary resource constraints in designing this non profit training, which are common to many training projects. Firstly, we had limited time with subject matter experts (SME’s). So, to maximize our time with SMEs, we developed more than one course at a time. The second resource constraint was that we were working with a fixed budget – which we frequently do. This requires making decisions during the project to balance the interactivity, scope, or production level with time and financial realities. For example, we created the videos on Canva instead of custom-made animated videos. Using Canva, we took purchased illustrations and produced the videos around these illustrations. This significantly reduced the costs by not requiring custom illustrations and animation production for the videos. The final video outcome was still very high quality but wasn’t Hollywood production level, which wasn’t needed or necessary for these courses.
Our Non Profit Training Process
At Spark + Co., we have a proprietary and well-defined process for elearning course design, which we used in creating this non profit training. While there are a lot of steps and work involved, a few of the elements that were important for this non profit training program were the following.
Using the ‘Jobs To Be Done’ Framework
The jobs-to-be-done framework is an approach to developing products based on understanding a person’s specific goal, or “job,” and the thought processes that would lead them to “hire” a product to complete the job. This technique is based on the book The Innovators Toolkit by David Silverstein and Philip Samuel. This technique helped provide a lot of detail and understanding of the non profit training audience and the specific challenges faced by executive directors and senior managers that they needed help with.
Multimedia Lessons And Practical Tools
We created multimedia lessons to explain and apply theory. While we developed the course for the Thinkific platform, we made many interactive activities.
As an official Thinkific Partner at the highest ‘expert’ level, we have proven experience creating interactive and polished courses based on the best instructional practices. We have also received the highest accolade from Articulate and are designated as Articulate Superheroes.
We used advanced tools and techniques to create highly engaging non profit management courses. This included Articulate Storyline, Super PowerUps, Wobo, and many others. This allowed us to develop highly interactive eLearning using various media unavailable on the basic Thinkific platform or other LMS, which we integrated seamlessly into these non profit training courses. These included
- videos
- interactive activities, games, and scenarios
- worksheets
- checklists
- workbooks
- animations
- interactive quizzes
- e-books + interactive PDFs
“Everything I learned can and will be applied immediately to my work and team. I found all of the guides to be extremely useful and easy to use.”
Maia G – Innovation Lead – Participant in one of the non profit management courses
Curriculum Development
In these courses, as there weren’t pre-existing courses, a curriculum developer was an integral part of the team, working with the subject matter experts to write the training content.
Outcomes From The Non Profit Management Courses Project
The outcome of the project was a program of non profit management courses that Realize Solutions could offer to their clients at an affordable price, including
- Talent Edge: Essential Hiring and Retention Tactics – Proven strategies to elevate your employer brand and recruitment and retention practices, making your company the top choice for high-performers and innovators.
- Strategic Agility: 10 Change Management Essentials – Leading large-scale change confidently and empathetically. Master key tactics that ensure lasting transformation and secure buy-in across your organization.
- Profit is Not a Dirty Word – Discover how embracing profit can amplify your social mission. Learn actionable strategies to build financial sustainability while staying true to your values.
“Throughout my career I have been part of multiple medium to large scale organizational transformations. Many of them failed to achieve systematic change due to a lack of adoption. This course clearly lays out change management pain points and active solutions to avoid or handle them.”
Chloe Z – Senior Product Manager after taking one of the non profit management courses
We designed the non profit training curriculum to empower and equip Executive Directors and senior non profit managers to hire and retain the best talent, create more resilience within their organization, and develop growth strategies to reach financial and other goals. All the courses are practical, focused, and reflect current best practices with numerous tools that can be readily implemented in management and leadership activities. The courses allow participants to reflect on their organization and channel the learning into actionable solutions to address their unique challenges. The courses are self-paced and in an on-demand format that is highly convenient for busy professionals. For example, in the Strategic Agility non profit training, a participant learns
- How to implement long-lasting institutional change
- To identify operational risks in organizational change
- Best practices regarding how and when to engage employees about organizational change
- Strategies to implement on the next change project, with rationale and action steps
- To map out change communication strategies and accountability timelines
- To gain confidence with the technical and human skills needed to manage and handle change
“This strategic agility course is a must take. I regularly go back and reference my course materials and lessons and am excited now to lead transformations!”
Jyoti B – Manager after taking the strategic agility non profit training
The final product of on-demand courses complements Realize Solutions consulting services, creates more value for their clients, and provides a D-I-Y option for clients who cannot afford consulting engagements. In addition, if several people are from an organization, the courses can be augmented as necessary with consulting support or live customized sessions from Realize Solutions experts.
The courses are hosted on the Thinkific platform. We developed them using Articulate Storyline, and worksheets and videos in Canva. The Thinkific site also includes numerous SuperPowerUps to make the site and the courses highly interactive and engaging.
Contact us for more information on this case study or how we can help you with your next training project.
