Every sector faces budget challenges when it comes to learning and development, but when your entire budget is being scrutinised, it’s crucial that you as a learning professional can prove the ROI of your L&D efforts, and make a real difference to the way that people improve their skills and performance. It has never been more important to have clear and auditable record keeping. This includes training, particularly for a sector where volunteers play just as big a role as employees. Highly scalable, Totara is ideal for delivering large-scale training programmes on a tight budget, meaning you can be sure you are investing the money you raise to support maximum impact in the field.

Opting for an LMS can be a fantastic solution to the challenges that not-for-profits face. There are a wealth of reasons why choosing Totara Learning is a viable option including:

• Cost Saving: An LMS can help cut the cost of training delivery by reducing transport, venue and amenities costs associated with face-to-face training.
• Efficiency: Everyone has access to new content as soon as it’s uploaded, meaning employees and volunteers reach competence faster.
• Accessibility: The LMS can be optimised to be more accessible for diverse not-for-profit audiences covering a varied set of demographics.
• Marketing: An LMS can be an effective marketing tool, educating staff and the public about the organisation’s work and encouraging donations.
• Portability: Certifications and Open Badges mean volunteers can take evidence of their training achievements with them as an incentive to learn.
• User Friendliness: A single system makes it easier for those with no prior experience of online learning to find the content they need quickly.
• Customisability: The LMS can be customised to match the organisations branding and look and feel, making it consistent with the rest of their digital activity
• BYO(Device) Approach: Not-for-profits can cut costs with a multi-device LMS which can be accessed from volunteers’ own devices, including tablets and phones
• Progress Tracking: The organisation can track learners’ progress to understand how successful their training or behaviour change campaign has been

Totara Tips for designing, implementing and launching an LMS for non-profit organisations.

Embrace Social Learning:

Introducing an LMS can push learning out to a community of people and increases accessibility for a wider audience. By giving users access to your learning resources to get the skills they need to help them on their way to where they need to be.  The use of forums and other collaborative functions can increase engagement among volunteers and provide your service users with peer-based support. Social networks and social learning can be invaluable for these groups and the right LMS can make this possible.

Raise brand awareness and reach through LMS:

Due to the fact that not-for-profits need to be careful with how they spend their budgets they often need to think outside the box for marketing tactics and how they can extend their reach of the LMS to the groups that they serve.

Use Courses for marketing purposes, offering short courses or quizzes on the subject matter which is helpful for their audience. An LMS can also be used for raising awareness round campaigns etc, and LMS can support campaign objectives by giving free and publicly accessible training and information.

Design Functionality: 

When targeting a public audience, it’s important to ensure that your LMS works across all relevant devices. This means ensuring that both the LMS and its content have a responsive web design.

Totara Learning is an open-source highly flexible LMS it enables organisations of all types the ability to deliver formal and informal training within the workplace and wider enterprise. At Enovation we have used Totara Learn with many clients from a wide range of sectors and sizes from Not-for profit’s, SME’s to large multinational corporations.

Contact us to find out more about Totara Learn.

*Please note that content that has been included in this blog post has been developed by our partners Totara Learn