Voluntary Services Overseas (VSO) brings together local, national and international volunteers to work alongside the world’s most marginalised and vulnerable communities to build generational change. They recruit volunteers on an ongoing basis, with each volunteer participating in training to enable them to deliver effectively.
VSO recently introduced HPass badges to reward volunteers and staff for completing their mandatory compliance training. Volunteers and staff complete a learning pathway consisting of four badges, in order to earn the VSO Compliance Training completion badge. Three months later, VSO have already issued over 1,900 badges!
Grace Taylor is the Learning Manager at VSO and led on implementation of their first badges. We asked her to share the top three lessons from the experience. Here’s what she said:
Learners want recognition for their achievements! I received many enquiries from learners following up on where and how to access their badges. People wanted to claim what they had earnt!”
Lesson 1
Badges are a wonderful tool to create a buzz/hype around a new learning opportunity – we ran a campaign to encourage completion of the modules, and asked people to share their badges on our internal Yammer board with the hashtag #iamcompliant. The more people shared, the more people commented and the higher the completion rate! As the badges are so visual it created a sense of intrigue as to what people were sharing and in turn resulted in more people becoming interested.
Lesson 2
Learners want recognition for their achievements! I received many enquiries from learners following up on where and how to access their badges. People wanted to claim what they had earnt! And be able to share their progress and achievements both with colleagues internally, and externally on professional platforms such as LinkedIn. I think the badges being so visual help too as we have learners from across the world and so the badges feel more accessible and inclusive as they don’t use words but imagery to portray achievement.
Lesson 3
Integrating the badge application form into course modules makes it much easier for learners to take ownership, claim themselves the badges and share them without huge time involvement from staff (the badge application form is a feature enabling course completers to claim and receive the badge automatically).
Featured Badges
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