Deliver the right message to your internal audience

The following case study showcases how Vyond videos allow Catalina Marketing to engage their employees in ways PowerPoint cannot, all while reducing onboarding time and increasing the productivity of their training team. With animated videos, Catalina Marketing has improved the learning of their 1,350+ employees around the world. 

Summary of Success

• 1 hour Time it takes for the Catalina training team to produce some of their videos.
• 67% Reduction in onboarding time for one group of new employees.
• 100% Pass rate for a new training program on traditionally low-engagement topics.

The Challenge

On a boat trip to Catalina Island in 1983, Catalina Marketing’s founders conceived an electronic alternative to the waste of mass-reach coupons: using grocery-store scanners to deliver targeted coupons at checkout. Today, powered by the world’s largest shopper history database, Catalina helps top consumer product goods (CPG) brands deliver the right message to the right audience in the right environment.

The company also wants to deliver the right messages—in the form of training—to its internal audience of more than 1,350 employees spread around the world, and the only way to do that is through eLearning. As Erika Hebert, director of Catalina’s global operations training, explains, “As a company, we can’t do everything face-to-face anymore. We just don’t have the people or the time.”

The challenge was to create entertaining eLearning videos with limited staff, time, and budget. “The alternative was sharing 100-slide PowerPoint decks that employees would never read,” Hebert says.

The Solution

These challenges came to a head in 2014, when Tricia Manning, Catalina’s executive vice president of global operations, approached Hebert about creating interactive training to roll out a new process to about 100 employees in Catalina’s U.S. operations.

“The audiences who needed to understand this new process included employees at every level, from vice presidents to individual contributors,” says Hebert. “Our goal was to get people trained on the new process, on time, with as little rework or retraining as possible.”

Manning suggested using animation to turn the training slides for the project into something easier for employees to digest. While doing her due diligence, Hebert discovered Vyond during a Google search. Vyond’s ease of use sold her on the platform.

“I got the free trial and created an initial sample video,” says Hebert. “When I showed it to one executive, she actually became emotional. I didn’t want to tell her how easy it was. We’ve been [Vyond] fans ever since.”

Vyond’s ease of use also helped new members of the global operations training team get up to speed and become productive quickly. Emily Pfeiffer, who joined Hebert in 2015 as a curriculum development specialist, says she only needed about a day to start feeling comfortable with the software.

“I thought I was going to have to go out and get a lot of assets that [Vyond] didn’t provide, but it has visuals for different business lines,” said Pfeiffer. “That’s a time saver because I don’t have to search for all of these images and themes to get my point across. It’s already built-in.”

The Results

Hebert and her team used Vyond videos to kick off the training for the new process. “[Vyond] was a cool wrapper that helped us get excited about the project,” says Hebert. “It allowed us to meet our go-live date in June 2015 and to meet all of our objectives for educating these employees.”

As an added bonus, Catalina Marketing discovered that onboarding time for new employees who needed to follow the process decreased from six months to 60 days.

Today, Catalina Marketing uses Vyond in conjunction with Articulate, and has embedded Vyond videos within Articulate Storyline 1 and 2 eLearning courses. Because the solution works with video and HTML5, it gives content producers more flexibility in choosing the right delivery vehicle for their work.

“[Vyond’s] key differentiators include camera movement, character customization, multiple video styles, and templates,” says Pfeiffer. “I also like the zoom and transitions that make your videos look more professional than your average free system.”

Catalina Marketing primarily uses the Business Friendly style but has also used the Infographics theme. “We’ve named some of the out-of-the-box characters for people in the company,” explains Hebert. “And we’ve even created characters that look like employees. The personalization makes the training fun for our audience.”

For a group that has a tight budget, Vyond’s pricing works, according to Hebert. “The only other pieces of equipment we had to purchase for Vyond were microphones,” she says. “Other than the subscription price, we’ve only spent another $30 or $40 per trainer on equipment like the microphones.”

Catalina Marketing continues to see success in incorporating Vyond into training programs. For example, one of the company’s big 2015 initiatives was to increase the quality of the data collected from UPC codes. To make what could have been a dry topic more interesting, Hebert and Pfeiffer created an eLearning module that included several Vyond videos. More than 100 employees were required to complete and pass the course—and 100% did, according to Hebert.

The Bottom Line:

In addition to increasing the adoption and acceptance of eLearning, Vyond has also made the training team much more productive. “It honestly takes me less than half a day to make a video,” says Pfeiffer. “Once I have the content that I want, I write a quick script, and then I build the animations and put it all together. Sometimes it only takes me an hour.” Concludes Hebert: “It probably takes us longer to get the content from our subject matter experts than it does for us to produce the videos!”

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Create engaging learning videos

With Vyond, anybody can create compelling content that promotes learning. By giving yourself the power of video, you can teach in a more dynamic, engaging, and fun way. Vyond Studio is designed to empower all kinds of businesses to make media that moves, even if they don’t have any video experts on the team. All you need is a little imagination. Give it a try with a 14-day free trial of Vyond.

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