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Below are the details of a Treasure Hunt that one of our Client Family Members created to introduce the LMS and increase usage. We hope you find it useful!
Essentially, the construct of my treasure hunts (TH) are as follows:
•There is a deadline, but it’s wide enough that anyone with a busy schedule can still meet the deadline.
•Submissions to me are required to be sent via email – I didn’t want any chance that interoffice mail would delay my receipt of an entry - outlook does a good job of guaranteeing that the submission is received by deadline.
•I always offer a chance for prizes – usually anyone submitting correct answers is entered in a drawing, and I usually select 3 winners (randomly) from the submissions.
•I only accept correct answers as submissions; HOWEVER, when someone submits an incorrect answer, I contact them and give them a hint of how to find the correct answer, which they need to return to me by deadline - and, while I would never advertise this to users, in the last TH, I included someone in the drawing who did not have time to get their corrected answers to me (because I knew she was slammed).
•I create questions that will direct users to the type of content I want them to see. Usually my TH questions include answers to frequent help desk questions. I also direct some questions to types of content I want users to experience. In my first TH, I directed users to interactive content and I created a question which forced them to open and complete IC.
•That’s another thing – I fashion the questions in a way that users have to actually access the content in order to answer the question, and I make sure the answers are very explicit – there is no question about what the correct answer is to each question.
•In my first TH, I provided a link at the end to submit a comment to the portal (which was public) telling what they think of the new product and what they think of the treasure hunt. Clearly, this can be risky and it ended up being really good in my case.
•The tricky part…the most difficult part of creating the treasure hunt was figuring out how to find the fine line between too hard and too easy.
I created what I thought should be the treasure hunt and I enlisted the confidence of a legal assistant (whom I thought could give me good feedback) and asked her to take the test with me in the room and just give me honest feedback. Her reward was that she was a guaranteed winner.
I chose someone who would not tell a soul that she had participated in this preview, so that when the winners were announced no one in the firm would
be any the wiser that she was pre-selected; they all thought she won a drawing fair and square just like everyone else. Having that legal assistant vet my first version of the treasure hunt was very enlightening – I was amazed at how much I had to really lead the user through the process.
In order for the treasure hunt to be successful it HAS to meet all of the following goals:
•It has to be do-able by even your busiest person
•It has to be a POSITIVE approach (you really don’t want anyone who doesn’t qualify for the drawing)
•It has to help your users have an enlightening experience with content they have probably not engaged in before – either new content (I introduced interactive content this way), or content they have that they probably don’t know they have (I made my users count the number of training topics I have in the LMS and it blew their minds)
•The TH isn’t a test and it should be conducted or perceived by the users as a test – it has to be a fun learning process so it can’t be so difficult as to put anyone off. It can accomplish the goal without being difficult to complete.