How to Modernize Your Non-Profit’s Digital Learning: A Checklist

Non-profit organizations of every size and type have embraced digital learning—after all, it’s a cost-effective and efficient way of onboarding new faces and ensuring compliance with the laws and regulations that govern the sector. However, is the learning management system (LMS) you use to deliver your digital learning actually up to the task? Non-profit organizations have needs that aren’t covered by older and even modern mainstream LMSs. In this article, Open LMS Account Executive, Ivana Delpra, takes a look six of the biggest of those challenges.

1) Can Your Digital Learning Systems Easily Handle Multiple Audiences?

Many non-profit organizations must reckon with how to serve content of all types to different audiences. So how do you currently handle serving learning content to members and non-members, or to different enterprises you serve, or different markets you work with?

For some less advanced learning systems, your answer may simply be that you don’t: everything goes in a single bucket, and you have to find external ways of directing learners to the right content. Perhaps you achieve this in your communications, or perhaps you have a decentralized network of multiple LMSs, one for each audience, in order to cope.

The larger and more complex your organization becomes, or the more different the needs of the audiences you serve are, the less viable this arrangement is. Perhaps non-members will interact with your organization and later become members (e.g. a person buys a course from you, then later joins your association), and you need an easy way of switching from one learning environment to another. You may even have sensitive information in some courses that shouldn’t be shown to a subset of your learners.

A more advanced LMS will offer multi-tenancy. This gives you one, central installation of the LMS for your organization to administrate, while each audience you serve gets a “tenant” LMS within that installation.

This allows you to provide a unique, tailored content catalogue and user experience for every group you work with. It also makes your system far easier to manage, maintain, and secure.

LEARN MORE ABOUT MULTI-TENANCY | ‘The Multi-Tenancy Advantage: 7 Benefits of Multiple Learning Environments Within a Single LMS’

2) Can You Connect to Your “Single Source of Truth”?

Your system needs to be able to talk to central sources of truth in order to easily administer large lists of members, volunteers, or staff. When a new person joins, you’ll likely need to give them access to certain training modules. When someone discontinues their membership, you want to be able to revoke access. Manually passing over this information from the administrator of one system to another to edit is slow and prone to human error.

Ideally, your LMS should be able to integrate with major HR, sales, and ecommerce databases out of the box. As soon as someone becomes a member, volunteer, donor, or member of staff, your LMS will know and will be able to spring into action.

3) Can You Easily Integrate With Specialist Systems Such As AMSs?

While many advanced LMSs will offer integrations with a selection of “single source of truth” systems to achieve the effects described above, they’ll inevitably be focused on the most mainstream of these systems. This skews their compatibility towards the corporate world—and systems that some nonprofits are less likely to use because of either cost or the lack of relevant features.

For example, if you work for a professional association, you may use an Association Management System (AMS). Such systems are focused on membership management, collection of dues, and will produce reports tailored to the specific needs of associations. Such a system may be essential for your operations, and contain information that would be highly relevant to your digital learning efforts—but will your LMS be able to integrate with it?

While you could search the compatibility lists of every LMS on the market until you find a solution with built-in support, there are a couple of other alternatives:

• Go open source: Choosing an LMS that’s built using an open-source framework such as Moodle™ increases the likelihood that someone has already created and freely published an integration you can use. Failing that, going open source opens up the possibility of creating that integration yourself.
• Commission custom development: Whether closed or open source, you may have options for getting the integration you require. The platform holder of a closed-source solution may offer custom development of an integration as an additional cost, but that will likely be your only option. With open source, you’ll have many more options for commissioning custom development.

A CASE STUDY YOU MAY FIND INTERESTING | ‘Empowering Animal Welfare: RSPCA NSW’s Journey to Scalable Training With Open LMS’

4) Do You Have Ways of Managing and Automating Certification?

How do you currently track your certification programs? It makes a lot of sense to track award and expiration dates within the same system that delivers the associated learning content. Doing so will allow you and your members to easily track when renewals are due—and you can set up notifications, prompting them to return to the system ahead of expiry.

You’re likely in the business of building lifelong learning partnerships with your members—if you make it easy for them to maintain and retrieve their certifications, as well as to discover additional professional development opportunities, you’ll ensure that people will come back to you again and again.

MORE ON CERTIFICATION FROM OUR BLOG | ‘Streamline Your Compliance Training With the Open LMS Certification Feature’

5) Do You Need Ecommerce Options in Your System?

If selling course content, programs, certifications, or exam attempts to an audience of members and/or other organizations that value your expertise is part of your model, having ecommerce features integrated into your LMS would be highly beneficial. Even if this revenue stream is not currently part of your model, it’s almost certainly worth having the option there for the future.

If you rely on a shopfront external to your LMS, you may encounter problems with course version control. You may also be limited to only delivering courses via a downloadable SCORM package—a valid approach, but one which relies on customers having their own LMS, and can expose your work to rights management issues (once they have the file, it can be difficult to stop them passing it on elsewhere without permission).

Ecommerce options can be added into many modular LMSs via integrations, giving you more control over delivering content to a larger audience (members, non-members, partners,  and enterprises) and offering various payment models (including subscriptions and upsells to free courses). In this way, a flexible ecommerce solution opens up a new revenue stream, helping you reach audiences new and old.

Some LMSs, Open LMS included, offer a built-in ecommerce solution. This further centralizes your learning data and analytics, and means you don’t have to deal with a different support team for your storefront.

6) Does Your Reporting Go Into Enough Depth?

Because non-profits must be especially efficient in terms of how they allocate time, budget, and resources, analytics are important across all aspects of their operations. Digital learning is no exception. At the most basic level, you may be monitoring course completions to ensure that new staff or volunteers have been onboarded, or to check annual compliance.

However, go deeper with your learning reporting and analytics, and you’ll be able to understand which of your pieces of content are most popular, or even uncover specific exam questions that learners struggle with, prompting content ideas to fill the gap. The data can also reveal when members are potentially becoming disengaged, prompting your intervention to ensure they stay on board.

An advanced LMS will present this level of data in a variety of different reports tailored to different stakeholders inside and outside of your organization. It should also be capable of combining this data with that from your other systems.

RELEVANT READING | ‘What Is Learning Analytics? 6 Key Use Cases’

7) Have You Considered Open LMS?

From multi tenancy, to ecommerce, to reporting, Open LMS covers all of these bases and more, making it the perfect platform for nonprofit organizations. We are proud to have a long history of supporting nonprofit organizations around the world, including the Pancare Foundation, Continence Health Australia, and our award-winning work with Smart Osvita, among others.

If you’re worried that all of these features come with a significant price tag, you may be pleasantly surprised—and we can also point to the added value of our world-class support team.