Transforming Membership Engagement: EYA's Digital Revolution

How the Early Years Alliance overcame fragmentation to offer a seamless membership experience
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Early Years Alliance Image of a child at play

How an integrated LMS elevated member engagement and learning

Early Year's Alliance Logo

The Early Years Alliance (EYA) is the largest and most representative early years membership organisation in England.

 

A registered educational charity, it represents the interests of early years providers across the country, providing guidance, information, and training to a network of over 28,000 members and supporters.

THE PROJECT
THE CHALLENGE

Creating a seamless, digital membership experience

The team at EYA were looking to upgrade their existing systems for insurance, membership, and training delivery, and to provide a better online, digitised experience for their members.

 

The LMS that they had been using was separate from their other systems, so they wanted to bring everything together to achieve efficiency and time savings for the administrative team. They wanted an in-house LMS that they could control, but also one where they would have the flexibility to create and deliver training courses. Finally, it was critical for them to have integration with their CRM (Microsoft Dynamics) to seamlessly link the three elements of the business together, both the admin team and their members.

 

An additional issue was that training content – which is a large part of their business and a membership benefit – was created via another separate system, making it difficult to manage for the admin teams and leading to disjointed experience for their members, who were unable to purchase all the things they needed in one place.

 

EYA’s membership base is also very diverse, from small childcare providers up to large multi-site carers with 100+ staff. With varying levels of technology skills, the one thing all EYA’s members have in common is that they are time-poor, but face a great deal of mandatory training that they must complete, therefore platforms which were easy and intuitive to use were needed.

THE SOLUTION

A unified solution: An integrated learning and membership platform

After talking to several providers, EYA found that many were unable to provide everything that they wanted, such as the combination of a complex LMS and the possibility to create digital training content in-house.

 

Using an LMS with integrated content creation and delivery means that EYA can now add training content to the platform whenever they want, which was not possible with their previous system. As Sarah Ellis, Business Development Director at EYA highlights: “It's all in one place for our members now. That's been massively beneficial.”

 

For Sarah and her team, having the imc Express content creation platform in place has also allowed the training content team to respond to new topics very fast, based on the needs of their members. They are also able to develop more new training in-house, using their own expert team, therefore relying less on third party training providers. The team have already developed 200+ training contents and are planning to deliver more of their face-to-face training online.

 

“We've got a fantastic development team in terms of their expertise in early years. Now with imc Express we can develop new content quickly with the team that we've got.”

EYA Image of caregiver with children at play
RESULTS AND OUTLOOK

A transformational impact: Doubling engagement and elevating member experience

In less than a year, the impact of the new integrated LMS was evident, As Sarah explains: “In less than 12 months, we’ve doubled the users on the system.”

 

By partnering with Scheer IMC, EYA now have a membership offering which is much more personalised and accessible, with access to an LMS to support the running of their organisations, which is unique in their sector and offers great value.

 

Take-up and feedback on the new training materials has been game-changing in terms of the learner experience, and all the training that the team created in imc Express has also achieved industry CPD accreditation.

 

Having everything in one place on the platform, including new and relevant training content and a simple and easy-to-use user experience, has led to an increase in both membership and training sales, because users can easily find related content that is interesting or relevant for them.

 

As the Business Development Director puts it herself when summarising the project: “Our overall objective has definitely been reached and we're pretty proud of what we've been able to deliver.”

Target
Seamless digital member experience
Learning format
imc Express
Result
200+ training content and 2x membership activity increase
WHAT OUR CUSTOMERS SAY
Sarah Ellis from the Early Years Alliance
What’s been really good is that with Scheer IMC we have a system that we've been able to bend and change, and shape into something that was right for us.
Sarah Ellis
Business Development Director
Early Years Alliance