Customer Spotlight

How Sourcewell turns up the heat on video training

As one of Minnesota’s nine service cooperatives, Sourcewell is a government agency focused on partnering with education, government, and nonprofits to boost student and community success. Sourcewell connects public agencies across North America with hundreds of competitively awarded contracts, providing cost-effective and streamlined procurement solutions.

300+

employees trained

4x

increase in audience

100+

training webinars per year

Challenge

Sourcewell needed a digital-first approach to training that could effectively engage its diverse audience, including over 300 employees and numerous public agency partners. The main challenges included maintaining interest in important, complex, but sometimes dry content and ensuring the training was concise and accessible to a wide range of participants.

“The thing I beat to death is engagement. Because I've seen a lot of places with fancy technology and expensive equipment, but it doesn't matter unless you make something interesting," says Mitch McCallson, Senior Multimedia Producer at Sourcewell.

The multimedia team at Sourcewell is always looking for fun and creative ways to deliver their content. One standout example is their playful adaptation of the popular "Hot Ones" format, in which celebrities are interviewed while eating progressively spicier chicken wings.

Inspired by the show's knack for creating an entertaining atmosphere, Sourcewell used this format to spice up its procurement ethics training. "We've been eager to try a 'Hot Ones' style because it's such a brilliant interview setup," says Mitch. The hot wings broke the ice and made the whole experience more casual and fun while turning up the heat on learning.

But to bring these fiery ideas to life, the team needed a platform to keep up with their creativity and make it easy for everyone to access and interact with the content.

"If you don't want to sit through your own training, that's a problem."

Mitch McCallsonSenior Multimedia Producer at Sourcewell

Solution

Using Vimeo, the team easily embeds videos into their training platform for seamless virtual training for employees and clients. Vimeo’s player helps them present an innovative viewer experience that makes the content feel less like government training and more like entertainment.

And, in a move that helps consolidate its tech stack, Sourcewell also uses Vimeo’s webinar tools for training and taps into the analytics to track engagement during live events. “We use Vimeo to track performance on video webinars a lot, and we have data now that shows where the drop-off is and, yeah, let’s just say don't go over an hour,” Mitch explains.

Outcome

Since partnering with Vimeo, Sourcewell has significantly increased engagement and retention rates in its training programs, which is especially important for keeping its remote employees up to date. The creative approach to training content consistently receives positive sentiment.

“What was great about the procurement month training this year is that we had 55 five-star ratings,” Mitch shares.

By creating and distributing memorable video content with Vimeo, Sourcewell has enhanced the understanding of procurement processes among their employees and public agencies while simplifying the process for the video production team.

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