How Top Career Accelerator On Deck is Saving Time, Money, and Resources by Leveraging the Disco Platform

Disco’s Customer Stories highlights the world-changing impact customers are making with their respective communities.

Overview

Learn how On Deck used Disco's purpose-built OS to help learners meet deadlines, attend live events, and experience  a world-class learning  experience that enabled them to meet their goals.

Background

On Deck is where top talent goes to accelerate their ideas and careers, surrounded by a world-class community. From launching a startup, leveling-up in their careers or exploring new industries, On Deck’s communities connect people to a network that supports their ambitions.

On Deck No-Code Foundations is a four-week, fully remote program for busy professionals and founders who are at the start of their No-Code journey. Rather than deep diving into a particular tool, the program focuses on developing members to think with a no-code approach. On Deck wants to equip members with the tools to navigate the no-code landscape and choose the right tool for the projects they want to create.

The Challenge

Needing a one-stop-shop for On Deck’s learners to receive information, complete lessons, and make connections.

When you’re focused on creating the world’s top community for tech talent and career acceleration, operational challenges can interrupt an otherwise flawless learning process.

‍On Deck found this out quickly and learned how important a seamless, integrated platform was for learners.

‍“The biggest challenge that I was seeking to solve was platform overwhelm and members missing key information like events and project work due to not knowing where to check to find that information,” says Ben Plummer, Sr. Learning Experience Designer at On Deck.

Ben and his team needed to find a platform that integrated the best parts of crucial tools like Notion, Zoom, and Google Calendar. The alternative to finding this platform would be to run the course using a combination of all tools and hope that members would be able to find everything that they need within a central hub.

“After running standalone learning modules for other On Deck programs, I knew that learning and navigating Notion as a novice user is no easy task. With only four weeks in ODNC Foundations, I did not think that it was enough time to learn the basics of Notion in addition to all of the other tools we planned to introduce to members,” Ben recalls.

Notion presented another issue, particularly on the program side. Establishing an organized learning progression by modules and the ability to release them gradually was important to Ben and the rest of the On Deck team. This process would also provide learners with fresh content more regularly.

‍The need was obvious: find somewhere to host the ultimate central hub where communities could gather, communicate, and find critical information about the course and their curriculum in a simple, one-stop solution.

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The Solution

A purpose-built OSthat integrates seamlessly with On Deck’s established tools and processes.

The search for the perfect solution tailored to On Deck’s community led Ben and the On Deck team to Disco. There were a number of positive attributes they enjoyed most about the platform, including:

• The speed at which they could get module progressions set up.
• Usability of the platform. “It seemed so easy to navigate the different sections of the site and to find what you needed with little effort,” says Ben.
• The dashboard and welcome module provided a really seamless onboarding experience.

Specific features like curriculum and lesson building and live event hosting made it easier than ever to give learners an end-to-end experience on one easy platform. With Zoom integrations, attendance reporting, and the ability for multiple admins to host at once, teachers were able to do their job more efficiently. With Zapier integration, teachers could also track assignment submissions.

All that to say — it was the central hub On Deck needed, built with care and support from the Disco team.

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The Results

Creating a net-positive experience for On Deck’s learners and earning back critical time for their team members.

On Deck’s full Disco integration hasn’t been live for long, but the feedback is already incredibly positive.

“We're still collecting user feedback, but we were able to run a ‘net positive’ experience for members. Aside from the experience, we were able to develop and launch the program in about two months. A number of factors went into this agility, but a big part of that was the ease of content creation afforded by Disco,”

Simply put: Because of Disco, the On Deck team as a whole has spent a lot less time on operations and logistics and more time supporting their learners’ goals.

‍He recalls: “I was able to save a lot of time on the logistics behind curriculum development in terms of setting up access to Notion docs and writing directions for how to use templates or hub documents. In fact, creating a Notion hub for this program would have been incredibly time consuming. With Disco, it wasn't necessary.”

Moreover, the learner experience was drastically improved for On Deck’s No-Code Foundations. With this integration, learners could more easily keep track of upcoming events as well as the required and optional asynchronous content associated with each of those events. The modules made it easy for members to come back after sessions and find potential projects to work on.

“Being able to join events directly from the platform enhanced this connection and minimized the chance of information being lost in the shuffle,” Ben says.

The Future

On Deck recently launched the Chief of Staff Academy for aspiring and new Chiefs of Staff who want to accelerate their career growth alongside a global community of peers.

The On Deck team continues to collect user feedback on their initial Disco integration, and is using that feedback to shape the Chief of Staff Academy experience.

All founders of communities feel a shared responsibility to shape the future of education — and it starts with empowering others to own their expertise and share it with the world (then, provide them the solution that makes it all come to life).

Now more than ever, there’s a huge opportunity to empower future teachers of their own expertise. People are actively looking for additional education to improve their own careers and lives, and empowering creators of courses, bootcamps, and academies with the right tools and community will let their experience take center stage.

This is ultimately what Disco enables: With a vision to democratize education, Disco is committed to being the purpose-built OS for communities use to shape the future of learning.

Read How On Deck Scaled an 8-figure Community Building Cohort-Based Courses for 10K+ Members