Corporate Best Practices

IN THIS ARTICLE
Improve engagement
Ensure flexibility
Maintain persistence
Make data-driven decisions

Follow these best practices to maximize Yellowdig's impact on engagement, flexibility, persistence, and data-driven decision-making.

Improve engagement

1. Use the point system! Using Yellowdig without the point system is like using a smart phone as a paperweight. While it provides some value, it's a waste of powerful tech. Gamification is what makes Yellowdig a robust learning system as opposed to a mere social media platform. Our point system motivates learners to offer their expertise, share external resources, raise questions, record videos, and write high-quality posts that attract positive attention from peers, managers, and other leaders. Gamification is our not-so-secret sauce.
2. Manage actively, but not too actively. If you never engage with your learners, you might come off as unserious or uncommitted to the program. But if you engage too much with your learners, you risk derailing free-flowing conversations and creating communities of sycophants. ("I really appreciate our boss's management style!") Striking the right balance can be challenging, so don't be afraid to experiment with different strategies. As long as you fully leverage the point system and avoid micromanaging, you're on the right track.

Ensure flexibility

1. Build in a periodic point buffer. If you include a periodic point buffer, learners needn't participate up to the weekly max every single week in order to reach the 100% participation goal. The higher the point buffer, the more flexible the Community. If you want to give learners the opportunity to skip a week or two, be generous with the point buffer. To accommodate busy employees, we encourage generosity.
2. Don't create required prompts. Instead, allow learners to contribute as they see fit. While other aspects of your program might be more structured and uniform, Yellowdig is the place to encourage learners to freely share knowledge, to question, to talk about their own roles and responsibilities, and to strike up spontaneous conversations with people they might never have connected with outside of Yellowdig. Think of Yellowdig as a knowledge-sharing portal where new collaborations occur and unexpected innovations arise.

Maintain persistence

1. Create long-term co-curricular Communities. Alongside program-specific Communities, create long-term co-curricular Communities that keep cohorts of employees connected throughout their professional journeys. You can create Communities for functional groups, for task forces, for specific projects, and for interest groups. You can even create organization-wide water cooler communities that last for years.
2. Encourage learners to follow each other. In Yellowdig, learners can follow other learners, notifying them when their friends interact in their own Communities or in other Communities. Yellowdig's friend system allows learners to organically create and maintain their own social networks over time regardless of which Communities they're in. This helps ensure that even when a program ends, learners continue to network and connect.

Make data-driven decisions

1. Follow our passive best practices. Our data strongly suggest that following our passive best practices reliably yields above-average learning outcomes. This is the fastest and easiest way to integrate sound, data-driven decisions into your corporate learning program. Our passive best practices include:
   • Enable points for receiving reactions.
   • Enable points for receiving comments on posts.
   • Enable points for accolades, and give accolades to 1-20% of posts and comments.
   • Make comments just as valuable as posts.
2. Use the advanced analytics dashboard to evaluate performance and make adjustments. Our Community Health Dashboard gives Community managers the data they need to maximize learning and promote knowledge-sharing. Inside the dashboard, you can see how many best practices you're following; how much content your learners are reading; how connected your learners are; and how many posts, comments, reactions, videos, and drawings your learners are creating on average. Your Sharing, Listening, and Interacting scores are percentiles that can be compared to other Communities in your network and to Yellowdig as a whole. These fine-grained measures give you the information you need to make targeted interventions. For example, if your Listening score is low, try increasing the point value of Comments, since commenting requires engaging with others' content. If your Interacting score is low, encourage learners to chat with people they don't already know, as this will increase learner connectivity.
3. Download detailed data reports for in-depth analysis. If you have an in-house data scientist, this is a great opportunity to take full advantage of our wealth of data. You can download Community- and learner-level CSVs which include over 100 combined columns' worth of aggregated data. You can use these data to run free-standing efficacy studies, or you can regularly feed the data into your own monitoring and analysis systems.

Audience: This help article is for Instructors, Designers, and Administrators.