This year, we at Thinqi have had the pleasure of bringing on board the inspiring people at one of the world’s leading business schools: London Business School. With lifelong learning as one of their key strategic initiatives for the next five years, the ability to provide a digital space for professional learning and peer-to-peer connectivity will be critical. This has come in the shape of AC2, London Business School’s alumni career centre, powered by Thinqi.
We caught up with Michele Asbury, Director of Learning Product Development and Mhorag Doig, Head of Alumni Career Centre to explore what success means for London Business School and how we can work together to achieve it.
Building engagement and reputation with top-quality learning
“Professional learning is a key differentiator and a key reason why alumni would engage with us,” says Mhorag. “It’s so critical, not just from the point of view of alumni careers, but to our broader alumni engagement strategy, which is to an extent built upon reciprocity. We want our alumni to engage with us, but we also need to be there for them. We need to let them learn, grow and develop in their careers – AC2 is a key way in which we’re going to do that.”
Thinqi has allowed London Business School to provide learning interventions and content to a global alumni community, many of whom aren’t based in London and aren’t on campus.
Mhorag continues: “This community might need different content at different times, based on their particular career point. Using a digital platform like AC2 is a great way to build and grow both our engagement and reputation as a provider of top-quality learning.”
A vision for success: innovation and engagement
There are two key focus areas that form London Business School’s vision for success:
- The innovation and development of new learning content, which includes the ability to fill gaps both in their own provision and in the market as new needs emerge for alumni support.
- Use of the AC2 platform to support a level of engagement at scale with the community, particularly when resources are tight and the team need to be smart about getting their content and insights into the hands of their alumni.
“The ease with which our alumni can access and navigate the AC2 platform is going to be critical,” says Mhorag. “London Business School has tried and tested many different engagement and community platforms in the past and it’s essential for us to provide a really good user experience for our alumni not just because we want to, but also because we’re competing with private providers out there. You can go anywhere for your learning content these days, so we really need to be relevant and meet alumni where they’re at. User experience and ease of access are essential.”
A data-driven approach to building engagement
Thinqi’s Courses and Networks features have been instrumental in helping London Business School work towards their objectives in building engagement and fostering a community.
The Courses app provides them with a simple yet effective way to structure, create and curate content to deliver learning programmes that meet the needs of their alumni, wherever they are. Whether it’s videos, events, articles, assignments or virtual classrooms, they’re now able to stitch together their already great content in the form of bite-sized modules and units.
“We came to Thinqi with some really good content,” says Michele. “We didn’t want to change that content and out of your back pocket came the latest version of Courses. We were able to inform the development of how that added value to our product, because we knew our product was really good – and I’m not just saying that because I like it – and it works beautifully in Courses.”
“One of the very original project aims for AC2 was around connecting alumni together from a peer-to-peer support point of view,” says Mhorag. “Leveraging that is going to be really important.” This will be done through Thinqi’s Networks tool, designed to support social and collaborative learning with discussion spaces and resource-sharing for key topics and best practice.
Data and analytics are essential for L&D professionals to help understand learner behaviour and keep improving their learning offerings. London Business School will be taking advantage of Thinqi’s comprehensive reporting tools to better understand the digital behaviours of their alumni and how they are interacting with learning content. As a lean business school, this will help inform strategic decisions about where best to spend both time and resources.
“This is going to be absolutely critical to helping us achieve our goals, because we can’t currently demonstrate ROI internally or understand the behaviours of our alumni on the platform. You can have all the great content in the world, but if you don’t know how it’s landing or how people are interacting with it and how they feel about it, then it’s all for nothing,” says Mhorag.
It’s time to work together to change that.
Working in partnership to put learning first, always
So far, it’s been “a big thumbs up” for London Business School when asked about their experiences working with the Thinqi team so far, according to Michele.
“We’ve enjoyed this collaborative relationship with you,” she says. “Right from the outset, the Thinqi team has taken the time to really try and understand exactly what it is we’re trying to achieve and I think that’s how we are where we’re at today.”
The advisory capacity of the Thinqi team has supplemented the technology to ensure that together we put learning first, always, leaving London Business School feeling “very, very confident” that Thinqi can help them achieve their goals over the next 12-18 months.
“I don’t think there are going to be any learning needs we’re not going to be able to address using the platform,” Michele continues. But it’s the level of support that’s really stood out. “You can have a platform like Thinqi that has all the best tools in the world, and all the best intentions for the experience. But if the people aren’t there to help you understand it, navigate it and help you deliver what you want, then you might as well waste your time. So for us, the big difference has been the support from you, without a question.”
With a great start working in partnership with Thinqi to create the best learning experience for their alumni, we’re confident that we’ll be sharing a follow-up success story for London Business School soon – watch this space.
