Get the right people on your side.

Build it, and they might come. So, how do you ensure real take-up of your learning and sustained communities? You need learning champions.

Learning Champions are people inside your organisation who are committed to making your learning communities and initiatives succeed. They must do more than just send out an email endorsing your programme or record the short (often un-engaging) introduction to the learning. This last contribution is often a political gesture that most learners see through straight away.

This is just window dressing compared to what you could (and should) be doing. You need to develop a group of enthusiastic, influential, respected and committed people. To borrow terms from The Tipping Point, they are one part maven, two parts salesmen.

Their role? To champion the need and value of the particular learning community that you are introducing. The key is that there must be something in it for them. It could be directly linked to their key performance indicators or simply a good way of building their reputation. Either way, they’ll only be truly committed if they see it will help the organisation and them.

With champions your programme has a real chance to succeed, without them it could falter. Learn from this American Express example...

American Express was introducing a radical re-think on product knowledge and the way their sales people should engage with customers. They needed to do it quickly as the market place post 9/11 was tough and very competitive. They needed to make their sales team better at consulting with clients - listening more and delivering real solutions to their needs.

This was hard for a centralised training team that has to cater for every country in Europe. In the past, initiatives had been taken up inconsistently. Now they were to use e-learning with a target audience who have little time, were likely to be resistant to some of the ideas and were generally unhappy if they had to learn on their own.

A blended solution run by local managers with pre and post e-learning sessions would help. But, how was American Express going to ensure that each country would introduce the programme effectively?

They organised a two day champions workshop held just before rollout. They had the champions experience the whole learning package (including pre and post e-learning discussions to engender the sense of community) and then got each champion to plan (and present) how they would ensure take up in their part of the organisation.

There was a timetable with implementation milestones agreed and an ongoing resource dedicated to supporting the champions throughout the length of the programme.

The end result? Each country introduced the learning programmes with a high level of take-up, all within the agreed timescales. A difficult cultural change was introduced and sustained with minimal kickback and a high degree of enthusiasm. Without champions in the community, this would not have been achieved.

So if you're looking to launch and sustain a community, don't forget that you need a community of champions to make it happen.