Vacasa

Responding to growth

Four years ago, Vacasa was a modest vacation rental company based in the US. A Learning and Development team of two people supported employees with elearning that was created, delivered and managed using an LMS.

Then, the business shot into the stratosphere. Holiday makers all over the US, South America and beyond were choosing Vacasa to make their vacation rentals easy, and the company grew by 16,000%.

“As you can imagine, two people trying to scale with an inflexible system was less than ideal” explained Ben Digman, Learning Experience Design Manager

Vacasa’s employee base was bigger and more varied than ever before. From housekeepers in Oregon to property managers in Mexico and so many more, employees needed high quality, mobile-ready training to enable them to deliver a consistent service around the globe.

The need for fast, flexible training was increasing, and Vacasa’s learning strategy and technologies needed to adapt – fast.

Driving success with learning analytics

Having identified that content creation was their LMS’s weak spot, Vacasa went on the hunt for an authoring tool to complement their technology stack.

“Because we needed our elearning modules to be SCORM compliant, we started to explore solutions like Adobe Captivate, Articulate Storyline, and xAPI, but we couldn’t find an elearning developer who was strong enough in instructional design, and vice versa,” explains Ben. “We had hired some amazing people who, it turned out, couldn’t fully perform the job they were hired to do using those tools.

With all of our requirements and methodologies in hand, we finally found the solution that checked every box: Elucidat. The platform was easy to use and also allowed us to build the quality of courses we expected.”

For Ben, discovering Elucidat was a turning point; suddenly, the team was able to deliver SCORM compliant elearning at speed and scale without compromising on the quality of the learning experience.

And it didn’t stop there. The real transformation came when the team at Vacasa began digging into the powerful analytics Elucidat provides.

“I was blown away that Elucidat allowed us to immediately identify problems within our courses we didn’t even know were there. I could see that, of the 700 people who had taken a required lesson over the last year, only 10–15% had actually completed it.”

With a wealth of data at their fingertips that their previous LMS simply couldn’t provide, Learning Experience Designers were able to measure the impact their elearning was having and make design decisions based on facts rather than hunches. They could make elearning that works for their organization.

An enhanced design process

This new focus on data fit perfectly with Vacasa’s design ethos. Truly understanding the problem was already the first step, but analytics gave them more nuanced data on their audience that they could use to set and – crucially – measure a goal.

The design process isn’t always a straight line from there. Working in such a fast-paced company with so much change, the learning team needs to be able to quickly pivot and adapt to support the evolving needs of the business. The granularity of learning experience data Elucidat provides means that these pivots can be based on hard facts.

“The analytics tool is a game changer for us. Now, we’re solving problems we didn’t even know we had.”

Employees get better training and the learning team has confidence that their solutions will have the desired impact and deliver ROI for the business.

Examples of Vacasa’s learning content, created with Elucidat.

Equipping an experienced team

“While I initially saw Elucidat as a supplemental platform, it’s now very much the opposite. Elucidat is now our first choice as a course creation tool. And it’s changing the way we build our instructional design team” says Ben.  “We’re hiring people who have years of development experience, and they default to creating with Elucidat.”

Like what Ben and his team are doing? Get in touch to discuss how you can use Elucidat to produce elearning that works.