About ShopGoodwill.com
ShopGoodwill.com is the first eCommerce auction platform created, owned, and operated by a nonprofit organization, Goodwill of Orange County, CA. To further empower Goodwill’s mission of helping people with training, education, and employment opportunities, they raise funds through auction sales.
On average eighty-five cents of every dollar goes back in to the local community of the Goodwill that listed the item on the site.
With over 130 Goodwill organizations across North America and Canada, selling unique items including collectibles, apparel, jewelry, electronics, and more, ShopGoodwill.com is able to create opportunity for individuals throughout the nation.
The eCommerce site was created by and continues to be operated by Goodwill of Orange County, CA. To learn more, visit ShopGoodwill.com.
We spoke with LaNina Stassinis, Business Development Specialist at ShopGoodwill.com, about how TalentLMS empowers her organization with easy-to-manage distributed training.
Training 130+ agencies under one umbrella
With 130+ agencies auctioning items on ShopGoodwill.com, including photographing them and listing them on the site, LaNina needed a solution that would enable everyone to be aligned on internal processes and procedures. The organization’s existing solution was difficult to manage on such a scale, so it was time to look for a new tool that would allow ShopGoodwill.com to conveniently and continuously deploy training to its partner network.
This is where TalentLMS stood out as an LMS that would allow them to create individual sub-portals (branches) for each agency. This would allow the organization to keep track of learner activity across the whole partner network. “We wanted a cloud-based platform that would let us cover the needs of our eCommerce, retail store teams, and ShopGoodwill.com processes and procedures. TalentLMS checked all our boxes.”
“TalentLMS was the only solution that allowed us to have as many learning portals as we wanted with as many users as we needed within each portal.”
Benefiting from a new training solution
Once they implemented TalentLMS, the organization started to seamlessly share training between different agencies. Thanks to its easy navigation and intuitive interface, LaNina now effortlessly creates 7–12 courses monthly to enable all agencies to stay current on best practices and operating procedures.
Because the types of items that the agencies sell change over time, they need to be able to create their own training content to match those needs. And with over 400 administrators across all branches, LaNina ensures that every agency can successfully upload their own content to TalentLMS by organizing interactive training to make it easy for everyone to create new courses independently. “We needed a solution to share training with our partners and empower them to manage their own training content,” LaNina explained.
Apart from deploying standardized training, ShopGoodwill.com uses a decentralized system of sharing valuable training content. If an agency creates effective training that increases sales of certain types of items, these courses are also requested to be shared with other agencies in different branches. This lets LaNina repurpose and share high-performing courses to reinforce everyone’s learning across the partner network.
Goodwill’s branding shines through every branch
Goodwill’s mission is at the core of everything ShopGoodwill.com does, and that includes training. So, when it came to branding each agency’s portal, LaNina wanted their look to align with Goodwill’s visual identity so that they all felt like part of one unified training environment. The solution was to use TalentLMS’s customization options to ensure every branch featured Goodwill’s visual identity, from logo to brand colors.
LaNina noted that this has also made it easy for the agencies’ learners to move from one ShopGoodwill.com branch to another. All the while, they can feel like they’re accessing the same learning platform. She also pointed out that it makes managing branches and making small changes easier since they all belong to the same umbrella of training environments.
Diving deeper into training with customizable reports
Keeping up with the training processes for over 130 agencies can be overwhelming. But not with TalentLMS’s reporting tools. LaNina explained: “We’ve set up custom reports to make our training flow efficiently.”
With dedicated reports, ShopGoodwill.com tracks how successful each agency is in completing their courses. And when an agency’s sales numbers increase, it’s clear to her that the latest training was a success. This allows LaNina to proactively provide every agency with effective training and ensure they have everything they need to further the Goodwill mission to the best of their abilities.
“We see more courses being taken and more users logging in to TalentLMS each month.”
Simple to learn, great to train with
ShopGoodwill.com wants to ensure that all of their training is easily accessible and understandable by all types of learners. To evaluate TalentLMS, LaNina created her free account first as a way to determine if she could easily use it on her own. “I went into it blind with no tools to see if I could figure it all out.”
She quickly discovered TalentLMS was very user-friendly. It featured many step-by-step guides, resources, and YouTube videos that helped her set up her training portal. If she needed support, she knew she could count on TalentLMS’s representatives, who offered their guidance and expertise throughout the onboarding process.
“The team at TalentLMS is fantastic to work with.”
Creating courses was important to LaNina. She praised the platform’s support for a variety of content formats, as diversified content is a crucial aspect of engaging training. “We can now have written content, videos, quizzes…TalentLMS hits all the key learning points for us.”
By being easy to navigate and giving them instant access to training content, ShopGoodwill.com’s users found TalentLMS very intuitive from the start. Users quickly learned to rely on it as their go-to knowledge hub. They now have over 1,000 monthly course completions and an average of 266 hours of training. As they started using it more regularly, one of their favorite features was the search functionality. This allowed them to instantly find the right kind of training without manually searching through courses.
“We’ve gotten a lot of great feedback from our partners about TalentLMS.”
LaNina further streamlined their learning experience by organizing courses into categories and sharing with specific roles and learner types. Using TalentLMS’s Groups functionality, she created training collections that learners could easily access.
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Reinforcing training with automated notifications
Due to the scale of ShopGoodwill.com’s training, sending manual notifications to administrators and learners across different branches would be challenging. LaNina’s solution was to use TalentLMS’s Notifications to set up automated emails for a variety of different actions.
She noted that automated notifications were major game-changers. These include enrolling in a new course and password reset notifications for user inactivity. These notifications have also helped ShopGoodwill.com’s administrators quickly learn about new courses as they are assigned to their branches. She pointed out their responses have also increased as the organization started using TalentLMS’s email notifications instead of traditional email.
“We’re now using TalentLMS notifications as our go-to communication tool.”
Exploring the training possibilities with TalentLMS
ShopGoodwill.com consistently deploys training to agencies across the US. They do this to ensure they have all the knowledge they need to further Goodwill’s mission. Plus, LaNina mentioned that they plan to use dedicated branches for their internal training efforts as well.
“Using the live chat is seamless, and we got all the answers we needed right away.”
LaNina also shared positive feedback about TalentLMS’s new interface and AI content creation with TalentCraft. She will continue to use them more actively moving forward. “We’re now exploring how TalentCraft can help everyone create courses more quickly and easily.”
Additionally, there here is potential to start using TalentLMS’s features. Conferences stood out as valuable for the organization’s live webinars outside of training. As LaNina explained, this would make tracking attendance and managing such events more convenient with a centralized system in place.
ShopGoodwill.com now has a versatile and proactive approach to training in place. They can now effectively support their partner network with the tools and know-how to bring Goodwill’s mission to life.
Thanks to the administrators’ ability to create new content on their own and for that content to be shared across all branches, ShopGoodwill.com now has a sustainable, reliable training program in place with TalentLMS. And with plans to expand how they use TalentLMS internally, LaNina is confident that they will continue to benefit from choosing it as their training solution.
