Tammy Ven Dange of Roundbox Consulting chats with Blake Proberts, CEO and Founder of Acorn about their innovative Performance Learning Management System (LMS).
In this interview, we learn about:
- 00:17 About Acorn
- 01:23 Acorn Not for Profit clients
- 01:58 Acorns Performance Learning Management System vs a Traditional LMS
- 05:03 Working with Moodle
- 07:48 Acorn PLMS for Associations
- 08:52 Acorn integrations
- 10:16 Acorn roadmap
- 11:51 Learn for Good program
- 12:53 Learn more about Acorn
Links and Resources:
- More info about Acorn – http://www.acorn.works
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Tammy regularly helps Not for Profits make IT investment decisions. Let her know if you need some help.
Tammy Ven Dange is a former charity CEO, Association President, Not for Profit Board Member and IT Executive. Today she helps NFPs with strategic IT decisions as an independent consultant. She does not take commissions nor sign partnership arrangements with vendors.
Video Transcript with Acorn (Minor modifications have been made for clarity)
Tammy Ven Dange – Today I’m speaking with Blake Proberts, CEO, and founder of Acorn. Blake, thanks for joining me today.
Blake Proberts – No worries. Thanks a lot for having me on, Tammy.
About Acorn
Tammy Ven Dange – Blake, for those of us that don’t know much about Acorn, can you please tell us more about the company?
Blake Proberts – Yeah, for sure. So, we’re a Canberra-based company founded and headquartered here. We have another little base over in Vancouver.
We originally started out as sort of a web app and mobile app development firm, I guess. Me and my best friend out of high school, Sam, founded the company.
We built some websites for some poor unsuspecting victims when we were like 19, 20. And being in Canberra, we ended up getting a little bit of a shot at a government tender.
That tender was for an LMS, and they came to us and said, “Hey, what do you know about LMS and whatnot?” And I was like, “We’re the experts in that,” and definitely, we were not.
And I had to ask my girlfriend’s mum at the time, “What’s a tender?” And she said, “Oh, it’s this big quote thing that you’ve got to put in.” I was like, “Okay, interesting.”
We put it in, subsequently won the tender. And then, within about 12 months we had about 30 or 40 federal government agencies on the product.
Acorn Not for Profit clients
Tammy Ven Dange – I know you’re also working with some Not for Profits, can you please tell us a little bit more about those clients?
Blake Proberts – Yeah, absolutely. We have some really awesome Not for Profits that we work with.
In Australia, we work with a couple of legal firms, so things like women’s legal, aboriginal legal services within territories and states YWCAs as well.
Overseas in the States, we have a little bit different ones that are a little less common here I think, but we work with West Virginia Food Banks, and also some sporting organisations, like US Rowing who, although they’re not probably your traditional, they are a non-for-profit as well.
Acorns Performance Learning Management System VS Traditional LMS
Tammy Ven Dange – Right. And just talking about learning management systems in general because we’ve been talking about LMS, and some people may not know that terminology.
Explain to me what you think the difference is or how Acorn views the difference of performance learning management systems versus a generic learning management system?
Blake Proberts – Yeah, absolutely. So, when we originally started and we were talking to people and say, “Hey, what do you do?” And I would say, “Oh, we have this system.” They go, “Oh, I hate that.”
We were like, “Something’s kind of wrong here, right?” These systems are geared towards the learner. And while admins are the buyer, the learner’s the primary user there.
And so, we sort of delved into why do people really not like these things? And what we came to as a conclusion is that the learning isn’t really linked to anything.
What organisations often do is they overwhelm people with content rather than have more specific and directed content, and have some form of benchmarking around capability development and performance.
So, our main difference is that we start with a baseline of capability that we help an organisation achieve, whether that be their internal staff or their external staff, or stakeholders that they’re training.
Then, we use that as a benchmark for “Are we progressing and developing capability in the areas that we need to develop that capability within? And if so, how quickly can we do that?”
Our job is to get you to do less learning, if that makes sense.
So, we want to get you from point A to point B as quickly as we can, and we don’t want to overwhelm the user with options or pathways. We want to find the most efficient and effective way to build that capability in that specific area.
Tammy Ven Dange – So, can you give us an example just to make it more tangible for someone who might be listening?
Blake Proberts – Yeah, absolutely.
So, we work with, I think it’s the British Columbia Forestry Organisation. And they have a requirement and a certification that their rangers, that are volunteers, need to do in order to be able to be allowed out and partake in that volunteer work.
Part of that is an assessment piece of, “Hey, are you able to meet the criteria to do these certain things?” So, what we started with first was a benchmark of, “Hey, where is everybody’s capability in this area? Where is that confidence level sitting?”
And then, once we found that, it was much easier for us to develop and create the content, and for the organisation to understand what they needed to build and deliver to that volunteer workforce in order for them to actually want to consume the content a little bit more because it was much more relevant to what they were looking at doing.
Tammy Ven Dange – And so, are you also building content?
Blake Proberts – We help out a little bit, but it’s definitely not our main bread and butter. Our main bread and butter would be the system. But every now and again we do have people reach out and say, “Hey, can you give us a hand us something?” And just being the nature of where we are, we sort of have that capability.
Working with Moodle
Tammy Ven Dange – My understanding is that Acorn is built on a Moodle base. And a lot of people are familiar with Moodle, but the demos I’ve seen, Acorn looks nothing like Moodle at all.
Blake Proberts – Yeah, so originally, Acorn was a Moodle. But basically, what we did was we took a Moodle and then we sort of realised that, “Hey, this thing is really hard to use and it can be a little bit clunky.”
Unless you are very well versed in it, the learning curve is quite steep and the reason for that is it’s so functionality rich, you can do anything with that platform.
And what we sort of found was, look, we have a specific sort of use case and clients that we want to deliver to, and a lot of that functionality wasn’t really needed for us.
So, originally we started with a Moodle base and then we tailored that base down, we actually pulled things out of it. But over time, what we’ve done is we’ve essentially removed that Moodle base out and moved into a standalone platform outside of Moodle.
We do have some little components that we’re still using like the SCORM player as an example, just because there’s not a really big difference. A SCORM player’s a SCORM player.
But there are some things in there that are much more geared towards RTOs in particular and universities that we find most organisations don’t really need unless they’re in that window of certified long-format diplomas or degrees style training.
Tammy Ven Dange – And it’s also multi-tenant, from what I understand.
Blake Proberts – Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. It’s very multi-tenanted. So, the best way that I have to describe it is instead of thinking of it as one platform, it’s almost like you can have multiple LMSs for multiple stakeholders within the tenanted environment.
That’s not just a different logo and a different brand, but it’s also things like user fields or integrations and whatnot within the system.
Our largest multi-tenanted instance has about, I want to say, about 60 organisations that use it collectively, but you wouldn’t know if you were a general user that other organisations are also using that necessarily. It really allows the deployment of very intentional training.
So, whether it’s to an organisation, an external workforce, or internal, catering to all of those use cases in one location we find helps a lot because often the training has a huge overlap.
Often the internal guys need the same training as the external guys to some degree, and having one place to manage it we’ve found be quite successful.
Acorn PLMS for Associations
Tammy Ven Dange – The other use case I could think of, especially in the Not for Profit space, is around associations.
They are providing white-label training opportunities to their corporate members that may want it to have the corporate logo on it as an example, but only one major administration role so that they don’t have to duplicate courses across all the different clients that they might have. And I could see that as a growing need as associations are trying to generate more revenue.
Blake Proberts – Absolutely. Especially the associations that have some form of a CPD point or a framework where they’re often rolling out multiple sets of training in multiple different channels to those stakeholders.
What we’ve seen be really successful is that multi-tenant platform where you can give an organisation their own experience, allow them to report on their own team members and things like that without the non-for-profit or the organisation actually needing to manage that on their behalf.
That’s what we find, that admin burden can be quite cumbersome because even a small organisation can have a really large array of stakeholders coming in. And quickly, it can start to overwhelm them.
So, what we try and do is use that multi-array of instances to basically give that organisation the power and control that they need, and give them one central location to deploy all that training.
Acorn integrations
Tammy Ven Dange – One of the other things that I think Acorn is really good at is integrations. Do you want to talk a little bit more about that?
Blake Proberts – Yeah, for sure. Thank you. We’re really proud of our little integration hub. It’s pretty cool.
We have a lot of integrations and most of them are out of the box. So, essentially, what we’re able to do is you’re able to jump into the platform, select what you want to integrate with, and then essentially the system will have some API keys that it’ll give you, you’ll go plug it into another system and we’ll pull it through.
Or if it’s in the case of something maybe like a Power BI or a bespoke integration, maybe a CRM into a Salesforce or from a Salesforce, let’s say, we have some quite broad APIs I would classify them as, which allows you to sort of push and pull any of the data in the system.
One of our ethos is that we want to play nice with others, so we don’t want to lock things in. We want the ability to push and pull that data in and out of the system, whether that be content, or whether that be user profiles, or potentially things like a payment gateway, if training’s been cost recovered, we want to make sure that we can work with any of those systems.
And so, we built our own little space in the product to allow our clients to be able to do that without having to think like, “Oh my God, integration, here we go. I got to get these people on the phone and then this other person here. And then, an email goes and two weeks later nothing’s moved.”
We wanted to get rid of all of that because we saw it happen a few too many times.
Acorn Roadmap
Tammy Ven Dange – Great. So, Blake, is there anything else you want to share about Acorn or where you’re heading, maybe the roadmap a little bit?
Blake Proberts – Yeah, for sure. So, what we’re working on and we’re quite proud of at the moment is the ability to assess capability within a workforce or a volunteer force with our AI tool that allows you to basically discover what capabilities are missing from that segment of users, and then assess them against a framework of proficiency.
So, that’s been really cool seeing organisations basically say, “Hey, we don’t actually know what skills and what capability or behaviours that we actually need, but we really like the idea of this.”
What we found was there’s a little bit chicken and egg, because if you don’t have a framework, you can’t do it. But without actually having some assessment in place, that doesn’t drive the need for the framework.
And so, what we’ve developed is essentially an AI tool that has conversations, can understand corporate documentation, things like the company’s plan, and then use that to formulate a capability framework and actually suggest what capabilities are best for different user roles within the platform.
Tammy Ven Dange – Wow. That will save a lot of time and energy right there, I imagine.
Blake Proberts – Yeah, hopefully. Hopefully.
Tammy Ven Dange – So, is that live now?
Blake Proberts – It’s in a prototype version with a few clients. So, we will have that up and running by the end of this quarter.
We just want to make sure that it’s accurate enough that we have sort of that 95% to 99% accuracy there, so that the admin isn’t sort of going, “Oh, this is completely off.”
So, we’re doing a little bit of training at the moment and we’re very close. Yeah.
Learn for Good program
Tammy Ven Dange – Great. Is there anything else you want to share, Blake?
Blake Proberts – Yeah, I think just the only thing that might be relevant for your audience is we do have a Learn For Good program and it’s a grant-based program where we essentially grant out to different organisations.
This quarter we’re at about $102,000, I checked this morning, of grants that we’ve deployed to non-for-profits. And so, we’re quite passionate about the area and being able to help out where we can.
And that’s not just sort of a, “Hey, look, you get a little 10% discount or whatever and you’re a non-for-profit, tick the box.” What we’re trying to do is make sure that we’re spending our actual time, resources and energy in there to actually help with where non-for-profits need help with those learning projects.
There’s a little committee internally that do that, and we pull the non-for-profits in and they decide how we’re going to grant those out.
So, we’re super proud of that. And if anybody is looking to have a capability or a learning development project, we’d be more than happy to chat on that Learn For Good program that we have.
Learn more about Acorn
Tammy Ven Dange – Fantastic. And so, if people want to know more about that program or your company, how should we direct them?
Blake Proberts – Yeah, the best place to find out more about us is just http://www.acorn.works. That has a lot of info there, also some contact forms if you want to get in touch with someone.
Tammy Ven Dange – Fantastic. Blake, thanks so much for sharing more about your work at Acorn.
Blake Proberts – No worries. Thanks so much, Tammy. Cheers.