ADN – Storytelling to drive digitisation.

To help social economy organisations accelerate their digital transition, the ADN developed, in partnership with the scientific, technical and social entrepreneurial world, a methodological guide to digital project management. Wanting to ensure that this tool achieved its goal, the ADN called on our educational skills. And we came up with? A fully illustrated, interactive e-learning path: the DigiProject.

The tool was to target managers of social economy organisations. An audience that is relatively unfamiliar with digital technology, that places great emphasis on human relations, and that approaches digitisation with an often high degree of apprehension.
This is the basis on which we drew up our pedagogical roadmap: clarify the content to equip learners, start from their concerns to get them on board, and reassure them to convince them to take the plunge. We also listed the technical constraints and specific requirements of the ADN before establishing together the learning objectives for this project.

The first challenge was to make the content as clear as possible.
We restructured the methodological guide into different stages and sections. We also rewrote the content so that it spoke a language familiar to learners.
To ensure that the learning experience is dynamic and effective, we chose targeted activities adapted to each section: quizzes, carousels and flashcards, as well as illustrations and videos.
The result? Eight interactive sections, accessible even without any knowledge of the subject.

The second challenge was to make the experience as engaging as possible.

How ? Through storytelling.

In an e-learning format, storytelling is a fantastic resource for helping learners to better project themselves into the project they intend to undertake.

Very well, but what story were we going to tell? We needed a story that could cover all possible cases of digitisation in organisations, but that would still be sufficiently specific to be relatable.

We opted for dual narration. Dual narration is a technique that consists of deploying two points of view on the same content or sequence in parallel. In this case, our translation of the methodological guide and a story we built from scratch.

We sequenced the story to match the initial content. And we inserted the story within each section of the course. This way, the learners on the platform and the characters in the story are faced with the same challenges, at the same times, but in very (very) different contexts. 

From a pedagogical point of view, this process enables learners to better understand the content, to associate images with each stage of the course to better retain information, and to let themselves be carried along by an additional thread as they progress through the course.

Based on this storyline, we developed a visual universe using collage. This technique enabled us to create an additional bridge between the physical and the digital realms, while breaking away from the stereotyped representations of digitisation. 

As for what we depicted: a reassuring environment with soft colours and welcoming contours. An atmosphere conducive to the success of a digitisation project. With a valley at its centre and Mount Digital in the background, a peak that three characters are preparing to climb. 

Three characters. Two human, to emphasise the change management dimension of any digital transformation and allow for maximum user identification. And a fox. That’s right, a fox. A symbol of sharpness and leadership. 

Elsa, Hugo, and the fox appear throughout the course, in the form of animated and interactive visuals. They transform the learners’ journey into a mission and become the learners’ best allies in their transformation project.

An easy-to-follow, funny, and frankly useful content published on Rise360 and deployed on an LMS. We chose Rise360 for its intuitive operation and for the fact that it superbly showcases the visual content produced by our artists.

And that’s not all. To publicise the existence of the DigiProject: two promotional videos based on the same creative concept. And to help ensure that the messages spread by the ADN are passed on to the teams: a deck of 54 icebreaker-style cards. 

We succeeded in meeting the very demanding eight-week deadline for all deliverables because we had (very well, truth be said) thought things through beforehand. The visual concept we developed, and the collage technique in particular, enabled us to quickly apply the same concept to a multitude of media.

Last, but not least. It turns out that the methodological guide we transformed into a learning path is just one chapter in a much larger project. We naturally took this possible scaling into account during the design phase. Both the storyline and the visual concept are ready to be extended to other phases and other audiences.