Creating Engaging Volunteer Training with Custom eLearning

The League of Women Voters of Salt Lake (LWVSL), a 501c4 organization, believes in the power of women to create a more perfect democracy. This has been their vision since 1920 when the League of Women Voters was founded by leaders of the women’s suffrage movement. For more than 100 years, they have been a nonpartisan, activist, grassroots organization that believes voters should play a critical role in democracy.

The LWV of Salt Lake came to ELB Learning for help in creating a training course for their 288+ members and new volunteers. They wanted to create a course that gave their volunteers the skills and confidence they needed to register women to vote at community events. This course would serve as a refresher for volunteers who have stepped away from the organization for a significant time period and for new volunteers. Volunteers attend naturalization ceremonies, community events, and student voter registration events at local high schools and universities in order to help citizens register. 

Over the last few years, Salt Lake has seen a 4X increase in naturalization ceremonies. So there is a great need for volunteers to help at these ceremonies and register newly naturalized citizens. It's extremely important that volunteers understand the importance of ensuring new voters complete the registration form entirely and legibly to prevent the application from being deemed invalid. Equally important is that they convey the next steps so that new voters know what to expect.

ELB Learning created a Voter Registration training program for volunteers at LWVSL using the eLearning authoring tool, Lectora®. The ELB Learning team donated design and development hours to this esteemed organization and mission. This course offers 3 paths: two separate paths for new volunteers supporting naturalization ceremonies and community/other registration events and a third path as a refresher course for returning volunteers. 

This training course will ensure the volunteers don’t overlook missing information and feel more confident engaging with the public. The course is hosted in ELB Learning’s Learning Management System (LMS), the Rockstar Learning Platform. The LWVSL decided against quizzes or assessments in this course. The goal was to instill confidence and not feel punitive to ultimately encourage more volunteers to join. 

As it can be taken anywhere, anytime, eLearning was a perfect solution to reach more volunteers and make it easy for them to complete the course. 

This past year, the Salt Lake League and its volunteers registered over 3600 new voters. 92% of them are new citizens.

“The ELB Learning team was generous with their time and talent–not only in donating many design and development hours but also in helping our volunteer leaders through several iterations to get to the solution they envisioned,” says LWVSL President Shauna Bona.