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You’re a nonprofit leader ready to grow your organization’s impact. The potential to extend your reach is great. With scaling as an imperative, your digital transformation initiative begins. But how do you ensure your program and your organization are ready? You may not see evidence-based digital learning design as a core component of the answer to that question. But we do. 

Digital transformation often begins with your search for the right tool or some ideal platform that will serve all of your needs. How often does it start with a conversation about what those needs actually are?

Organizations that use teaching, mentoring, or consulting to deliver their mission have likely faced an existential challenge since the COVID-19  pandemic hit, restricting in-person connections. Perhaps they had previously considered moving online but had not yet made that commitment. When the pandemic struck, they had to quickly transition to an online-only delivery model. This has probably involved copious amounts of Zoom and Google Hangouts.  Organizations have no doubt discovered that filming a play and calling it a movie does not result in Avatar. 

Digital transformation is a long journey, one that we have helped several organizations navigate. The first steps are uncertain, the unknowns are many, but the potential payoff is large. Answers to the following questions can help you determine whether or not you’re ready to take those first steps. We run through these questions very early in the "getting to know you" stage with the project champion as a way for the potential client to learn how Extension Engine thinks about projects.

We work with many nonprofit organizations that are trying to move their value-delivery — that is, their training, courses, and workshops — online. In this article, I use such a framework to analyze the value that attendees get from face-to-face events and then discuss how these events might be moved online while simultaneously increasing their value by improving both the access to and the effectiveness of their training.