Running great CiviCRM training sessions

This page aims to be a distillation of experiences, tips, and tricks that come from running CiviCRM training sessions. Please feel free to add your experiences and ideas here.

Half way through the page is a series of checklists for before, during and after the training and at the end of this page is a todo list of things that you can do today to help improve CiviCRM trainings. If you are running a CiviCRM training, you should familiarise yourself with this document and do a couple of things from the to do list in preparation.

Starting the day

You can start off by going round the room asking people what they want to get out of the day, or you could do something more interesting / inventive like splitting into groups and answering the questions 'how do you want to use CiviCRM' and then doing a report back.

The training rhythm

For each of the items on the training agenda (for example, contributions, or templates) the training rhythm goes something like this.

presentation (the background to the exercises)
example (going through the basic screens that you will see)
exercises (using the exercise books)
recap (see recap TODO below)

Consider breaking up the day with presentations from attendees that are already using CiviCRM.

Here's some more detail on each of these parts of the training...

Start of with a presentation

Don't to a presentation without a power point, especially if you know a lot about it. In fact it is probably worse if you know a lot about it because you explain stuff in the wrong order, miss out key information, etc. You don't have to religiously stick to the powerpoint, or just stand there and read off the slides, but they are written as introductions to the subject, with concepts introduced in a sensible order, etc. You are of course welcome to dive in and improve the powerpoints as well :)

The slides are pointers to ensure you cover all salient points, not a script to read out, so avoid reading out the slides as a script. Have a 'conversation' with your audience based on each slide. If you want to remember to say something or to expand on what is written on the slide, add something to the notes.

Keep the slides short and too the point. If a slide is getting too wordy, consider splitting in two.

Then show an example

Initial examples should show people what they will be doing, for example for Contributions in the user and admin training should take people through the work flow on a demo site. This is important because some people won't have done this before. In later examples, this becomes less important (especially in the user training) as the screens will now be familiar to people so you can show some real world examples.

Let people get on with exercises

Be ready to answer questions as soon as people ask them. Make notes of the questions people ask so you can go over them during the recap (or get them to talk through them).

Recap the exercises

Try and leave 15 minutes for recap and discussion of the exercises. Suggested questions for kick off include:

was this easy or hard
did you like doing this
what problems did you have
what did you learn (from your mistakes - though that does sound a bit negativo, I admit)

You can also ask people at this point if they think they are using / will use this part of CiviCRM and if they have any questions about how they are using / will use it.

Case studies

Presentations and case studies of real life sites by attendees are a great way to bring CiviCRM to life. One or two presentations a day which concentrate on a specific component or aspect of Civi is probably the right amount. Give presenters as much time as possible to prepare. Feel free to ask people on the day if they would like to present, but don't be suprised if they say I would have liked to present if I'd had more time to prepare.

Feedback from participants suggests that presentations aren't shouldn't be used as a substitute for proper introductions from the trainer on any subject. And that case studies should preferably be done after the subject has been introduced through the formal training.

Surgeries

If you have time or would like to break things up a bit, going through an attendees specific use case, and talking about

Bug reporting

Hopefully by the end of day one you will have discovered a bug with CiviCRM, or even better someone will have come up with a good idea for a new featurette / workflow improvement, etc. Reporting this bug (ask if anyone in the room has an account with Jira already) is a good way to demystify the bug reporting process and showing people that it is pretty easy to do :)

Timings

Don't worry if your presentations finish a little earlier that expected. Time spent doing exercises tends to go much fasterMake sure that you leave enough time for feedback. In general, a 20 minute presentation, followed by a 10 minute example, followed by 1 hour of exercises is good. That makes 90 minutes in total.

If your day starts at 9 and you aim for 4 sessions (two in the morning and two in the afternoon) per day, 2 sessions of 30 minutes for extra stuff like introductions, case studies, talks on the community, etc., and an hour for lunch you should finish at 5pm. (90 x 4) + 30 + 30 + 60. Add in an 45 minutes hour for slippage / small breaks and you will be finished by just before 6pm.

It's easy to let time slip away. If you are ahead of schedule, that's a good thing!. It is a mistake to slow down if you are ahead of schedule because you're likely to slip behind anyway later in the day. Don't ever think that you have plenty of time :)

Make people feel at home

Encourage a friendly atmosphere where people feel happy asking questions, that it isn't about knowing all the answers, that there are no stupid questions, etc.

be aware of minorities during the training, people that might feel intimidated, non techies, females (if there aren't a lot of them, and equally males, if there aren't a lot of them!) Joomla users.

People have different learning styles and different ways of interacting (teaching psychology is beyond the scope of this wiki page!). It pays to be aware of these so you can make sure that you are engaging everyone.

If you are running two trainings at the same time, encourage people to mingle during the breaks and try and match make people.

Printed copies of presentations

All the work that people will be doing is online. Never the less, it really helps people if they have things printed out to guide them through the day. Printed out agendas, presentations and exercises that attendees can make notes on are really useful for helping people feel more comfortable because they know where they are, and what is coming when. Having a list of exercises printed out also cuts down on the amount of alt+tabbing people have to do and having printed out presentations gives them something that they can take home (though make sure to let them know if the powerpoint you are using differs from their printed copies.

Questions and interuptions

Encourage people to ask questions and interupt if they have a question, but keep an eye on the time. Don't spend so long answering a question that you don't have time to finish your presentation. And especially if the question is really specific and other people aren't interested in the answer (you can always ask others if this is relevant), you should probably give a short answer and offer to talk more about with that person during the exercises.

Checklists

Before the training

Being completely prepared for the training before hand means that you can spend more time at the training engaging with attendees. Before the training make sure of the following

Do you have enough trainers?
A teacher:student ratio of 1:6 is about right to ensure students are getting enough attention
Are you familiar with the subject matter of the training?
If you are weak in some areas, do your homework and find out as much as possible about these areas in good time for the training, or invite someone else to the training that can cover this area.
Do you have print outs of the course materials?
Including
- Outline agenda of the training (both days)
- Print outs of the presentations
- Printed exericises that people can work through (this avoids people having to switch tabs as they work through exercises and means they can tick things off and make notes as they go
- Evaluation sheets
Do you have copies of the CiviCRM book to hand out to attendees?
You can get copies printed online with Lulu or by a local printer. See this blog post for details on how to do that (http://blog.booki.cc/?p=397).  The earlier you get it printed, the less it will cost
Make sure the internet works!
The best way to do this is to visit the venue and test it for yourself. Just asking is there wireless internet is not enough - event staff will often presume that you only need one or two connections for presenters, not a connection for everyone. Some event venues have strange ticketing systems to grant access to the internet, or routers that limit the amount of connections, or just have a really slow connection. Also, there may be other people at the venue using the internet at the same time so check this out. A 2mb line isn't enough when the guys upstairs are streaming youtube videos! We've been caught out by this a couple of times and it doesn't look good!
Do you have all the equipment you need?
projectors, flip charts, etc.
Are you familiar with the presentations and the exercises?
- Have you rehersed your presentations?
  i.e. said at least some of them out loud.
- Have you actually done the exercises?
  You'll need to be familiar with the exercises to ensure that you are giving people the right answers to their questions and to be able to tell people when their questions will be covered in later exercises etc.
- Are the exercises localised to be relevant to your audience?
  Do the examples make sense to your audience? Do the address formats and currencies make sense? There are exericises at the beginning to localise the installation. Are these correct for your country? The only way to make sure that the exercises will go well is to have gone through them yourself.
Do you have training enough training sites set up and ready to use by participants?
Participants work through exercises in pairs. If you have 20 attendees, you will need training sites A to I (and they only go up to F!)
Do you have any examples / case studies from attendees lined up?
These are better / more reliable if arranged in advance rather than on the day

During the training

Make sure you hand out evaluation forms

After the training

Following up and post training work is really important.

Go through your event evaluations
Send an email to attendees with follow up from the training
Add your experiences and ideas, and feedback from participants to this page on how to run great trainings
Add up your scores from the evaluation forms to grade yourself and find out what you could improve next time!

TODO: things we can do to improve training

Look in more detail about how the training and the book fit together
Improve event evaluation forms
improve event template on CiviCRM.org. Make it clear that this is admin, not every day user, but that it should be useful for users wanting to find out all the things that they can do with CiviCRM. Make it clear that we are using Drupal, not Joomla
improve and create more exercises
ensure that the exercises are written in such a way that you can test someone's understanding / work by using their example site during the recap. e.g. if they have created an event registration, you can go through the page that they made).

Areas that we didn't cover

Planning custom data - more on when to use contact types, groups, tags,

Improving exercises

Fix the problem where only one person can do the exercises when people work in pairs and so the other person does nothing - maybe do this by adding extra templates / exercises

Find a way that people can create events, etc. that apply to their own use cases.

Find

Attendees have asked for more exercises 'to help us more thoroughly explore areas'. Could add exercises on:

advanced search exercises
using tabs vs. inline custom data

Structure exericises a bit more. Step by step at the beginning and then more freeform toward the end.

Improving the evaluation form

Extra questions that we could add to the form:

How could we improve presentations (text)
How could we improve examples and case studies (text)
How could we improve exercises (text)
What subjects would you have liked us to cover that we missed or didn't cover enough?
What other resources would be helpful to you as you work with CiviCRM?