Subscription Training for Nonprofit Boards with Christina Becker

Course Lab - Episode 73 Subscription Training for Nonprofit Boards (Christina Becker) Abe Crystal: How do you get people who are not totally bought into this yet? Like, they may be on board with it intellectually. But they're not necessarily jumping up and down to go through this training. How do you really help them make the most of it? Danny Iny: Hello, and welcome to Course Lab, the show that teaches creators like you how to make better online courses. I am Danny Iny, the founder and CEO of Mirasee. And I'm here with my co-host, Abe Crystal, the co-founder of Ruzuku. Abe: Hey Danny. Danny: In each episode of Course Lab, we showcase a course and creator who is doing something really interesting, either with the architecture of their course, or the business model behind it, or both. Today, we welcome Christina Becker to the show. Christina is a Jungian analyst and the Vice President of Becker Associates. Christina, thank you for coming on the show. Christina Becker: My pleasure. Thanks for having me, Danny. Danny: So I know that you're involved in a lot of different things. Share with us the backstory. How did you come to be doing what you're doing? What was the journey that eventually made its way to online courses? Christina: Well, this was a long time ago, maybe about eight or nine years ago. Being a Jungian analyst, I often get invited to speak at events, local societies, they say, come and do a workshop. And so I had a library of lectures and workshops that I only delivered once. And I thought to myself, well, wouldn't there be a wider audience to that? And so that was when I started to investigate how can I get a larger audience to some of this material that I only delivered once. So I started to investigate that and got onto Ruzuku, and just started to explore a number of things around that. And at the same time, I had this idea from the Canadian Nonprofit Academy, that I wanted to offer an accessible on-demand training program for boards of directors. And so I had these parallel ideas, these parallel projects, that meant a larger impact. And so when I connected to Course Builders Laboratory, I started to think about how can I make this really accessible. And that's when I started to learn about course design, and marketing and all of that. Danny: Tell us about the courses that you have up and running now. Christina: So on the Canadian Nonprofit Academy, we have what we call our flagship course called the Board on Board Leadership Training Program. And what we've done is we have created courses specifically for organizations, so that they would put through a cohort of their board of directors through our program, and we created it around a core curriculum, and then we adapt it as we go to the specifics related to the organization. So we have led about 25 organizations in the program. It's all around the core, and then we tweak it based on the organization. The other thing I have is what I call the Jungian Masterclasses, which is now evolving into a hybrid form. I do lectures in which I record usually less than 10 minutes and then we have a two and a half hour live Zoom call where we work on dreams. And then there's a time for creative processing. People get to share and be in breakout groups. And that's actually working really well because we give people 45 minutes or so to just be with whatever creative process they want to do, and then they come back and share. Danny: So you've got two very different sides of your business going on. It's two different businesses. And that's not what we would recommend. Usually the advice is to pick a lane, but that's not what you want to do. How have you balanced that? Christina: Well, it did burn me out. So every once in a while, I kind of go, okay, I need a week off. I think over the last couple of years more and more of my energy and priority has been with the Canadian Nonprofit Academy. There's a lot more passion there. When I think about it, and when I really connect to the impact that I want to make, I feel like the nonprofit sector has a lot to offer and can make people's lives so much better. And when they don't have a board that is properly trained in their roles and responsibilities, their impact in their community suffers. So I'm just really actually following the energy. Danny: When I look at the Jungian Masterclasses, it's clear what qualifies you to deliver them. You're a Jungian analyst. What qualifies you to teach nonprofit boards how to function effectively? Christina: Before I trained to be a Jungian analyst, I actually did nonprofit consulting and worked in the nonprofit sector for about 20 years. My first job out of university was working for a small association. And then I got a Masters of Business and Arts and Media Administration in my late 20s and was a consultant and did a lot of nonprofit consulting and management throughout my 20s and 30s. Danny: How do you approach delivering courses to a team rather than an individual? Christina: There were a couple of things. I really did initially model it on the Course Builders Laboratory, this idea that there was a governance coach available to the board that would be available to them as they go through the program. So we designed the program so that they could ask me any question in the discussion board, and they could set up a phone call with me at any point during the program. I also created a subscription model, so that boards get to have access to all of the material for as long as they pay for it. There's an initial fee at the beginning and then there is a lesser fee for each subsequent year. With the idea that if board members need to review the material, they have it readily available. So if they're sitting in a board meeting going, I think I read about this thing, I want to go back and check. Having it accessible to them means that hopefully they will review it. And the second reason I created it that way was so that if a new board member came on to the board, they would have immediate access to training. And I think that means they could be fully functional as soon as they get to the table. The other thing I did was make sure the lessons were less than 10 minutes. So a lesson is like a six, seven, eight minute video and it's also available on audio and in a transcript to take into account various learning styles. I was really mindful of making it really accessible for adult learners and for busy people, because I think board members don't want to be sitting down in front of a computer for 45 minutes. Abe: How did you find that working? Were there challenges you encountered that you had to iterate and adapt? Christina: The biggest thing I have encountered is getting people to complete. So we've put into place email reminders from me, working with the champions, so that could have been the board chair or the executive director, to say, how can you bring it up at a board meeting. We've encouraged boards to make it mandatory. And we send progress reports to the main person every month so they can see exactly where everybody is in the program. Abe: Well, there's completion and then there's what are people doing based on what they've learned. Is that something that you attempt to look at? Christina: Yes, in our course evaluation at the end, one of the main questions is, has this helped you and why. The biggest affirmation I got was somebody who said they had been a board member for 16 years and found that our program deepened their ability to be a good fiduciary of their organization. We've also had people who've completed and then said, oh yes, we need to have this program for our organization. And so we've sold three or four programs after that just from board members who've done it at other organizations. Danny: Tell us about the business model. How much does the program cost and how does it work? Christina: The business model fundamentally is that we want to be the partner of organizations in their board governance training. We created it based on a subscription model. They would pay a slightly larger fee upfront, ranging from $2,000 to $6,000 depending on the size of the board. And then the idea is that they always have access to training. We're having a lot of success with people just Googling us. We also have included on our website a free governance assessment, so people can fill in the assessment and get a score out of 100 and see where they are against best practices. Danny: If this is not how the sector usually organizes, what prompted you to do this on a subscription basis? Christina: I came up with the subscription model because board development and board training is an ongoing thing. It's not just a one-off thing. I needed to create a sense of security that we were building something they could rely on in the long term. It takes the reinventing of the wheel out of the equation. The major mindset shift is that board training or development is an ongoing personnel management activity that you have to put front and center. Christina: The biggest thing I've learned in this journey is both the need and the excitement for iteration. Once you create a course, that's not it. It's a dance between your students and yourself and learning new things. For course creators, it's a constant evolution, constant iteration around how to make the course better, how to make it more relevant. Danny: Now stick around for my favorite part of the show where Abe and I will pull out the best takeaways for you to apply to your course. Abe: What really stuck with me is this challenge, but also opportunity of creating learning experiences where the buyer and the learner are somewhat different, even though they're related. In Christina's nonprofit training, she's essentially selling this concept to a board of a nonprofit or an executive director. But for her training to really have an impact, what she needs is for everyone on the board to go through it, to understand it deeply, and to apply it. Which is a bit different than the kind of typical course we talk about where someone signs up because they want to improve their own watercolour painting. So it's pretty interesting context, and it raises a real challenge around how do you motivate and engage people who didn't even sign up for this training on their own. Danny: I found also really interesting the discussion around kind of completion versus maybe other metrics of success. Not everyone wants to go through a course from start to finish. Just getting creative around how to measure success, and what is the success that is meaningful for your students, is really important. And on the topic of getting creative, I really liked that she had this idea that it would just make more sense for this to be subscription based, even though it wasn't generally done that way in the industry. Abe: Yeah, it applies to both the learning model and the business model. Abe: Christina Becker is the Vice President of Becker Associates, as well as the creator of the Jungian Master Classes. You can learn more about her and her courses over at cjbecker.com. And you can learn more about her nonprofit training over at canadian-nonprofit-academy.com.