Delivering lifelong skills to young people
CLOVER is an engaging e-learning platform with Positive Youth Development at its core.
The brief
4-H is one of America’s largest youth organizations, developing important life skills in its members through after-school programs, workshops, and camps in over 9,000 clubs across the country.
4-H approached us to help create CLOVER by 4-H, an exciting e-learning platform that marks the digitalization of 4-H’s longstanding educational program.
Through CLOVER, we set out to dramatically expand 4-H’s learner base, break down barriers, and reach students across broader geographies and socioeconomic backgrounds. Ultimately, this sets up 4-H to impact more lives for the better.
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Having the platform to engage in learning experiences through technology is critical.
The true mission of 4-H
The most powerful aspect of CLOVER is its digitalisation of 4-H true mission - to give young people an internalised sense of competence, usefulness, belonging and power through the Positive Youth Development (PYD) education framework. These internalised beliefs empower youth to achieve their best.
Our vision for this project was to actively bring proven PYD principles into CLOVER by 4-H, along with a best-in-class learning experience and engagement tactics.
Achieving this goal in CLOVER represents long-term enablement and a lasting impact for learners that is far greater than the sum of individual lessons.
[Video title]
Having the platform to engage in learning experiences through technology is critical.
The CLOVER learning hub
The new CLOVER dashboard (learning hub) shows combined progress, goals, awards, activities and a scrapbook in a central interface. It is a space for positive reinforcement and orientation for one’s learning journey.
Progress and positive reinforcement help keep users engaged and tie back to competence.
The learning hub act as a jumping-off point to each section and provide a way for 4-H to guide users to their next lesson. As we learn more about our learners, 4-H have an opportunity to leverage data to be able to predict what to serve learners to keep them on their learning journey.
[Video title]
Having the platform to engage in learning experiences through technology is critical.
The learning experience
The 4-H learning experience is largely non-linear, so the level by level motivation that learners traditionally draw from had to be substituted for an advanced system of accomplishment and encouragement.
Using key tenents of Postive Youth Development along with best-in-class CX principles we considered how to make the platform highly engaging for learners.
Firstly, an active tactic for building competence is to break down lessons into smaller tasks - and so we did exactly that, using visual devices and a language that makes it feel easy and bitesize - aiding competence and power.
We also thought about making the learning interface less passive - using multiple mediums such as video, imagery and polls. We call on users to participate throughout to support learning with flash quizzes or other tactics that aid attention and help internalise the learning.
Lastly - we enable learners to identify areas that they find most exciting or compelling to return to later. In building our favoured lessons, we also benefit in retention and engagement (users are storing value in the product, which is a critical pillar in the very famous Hooked Engagement model).
[Video title]
Having the platform to engage in learning experiences through technology is critical.
Results
Our goals include broadening our geographic reach, enabling youth from previously excluded socio-economic groups and driving the effect of positive youth development's long-term outlook. We can see from early indicators that our goal to increase our reach exceeded expectations.
Additionally, our scale goal (from 6 million kids to 10 million) is building momentum with a 32% month-on-month growth rate.
Since launch, we have had an average 32% month-on-month growth in learners joining the platform.
Penetration amongst minority groups in previously untapped geographies has grown by over 8x - which is one of our main objectives.
CLOVER has resulted in over 10 million dollars raised towards the 4-H mission to reach young people.
CLOVER is not just a website - It is the transformation of an American heritage brand. This purpose-driven organisation has had a multi-generational impact (since 1902) and reaches 6 million kids annually.
Our work on CLOVER sets up 4-H to impact the lives of generations to come and to maintain and grow its incredible reach and brand across the USA.
