How Civics Academy transformed and grew their business with HowToo

Civics Academy, a company providing mandated ethics training for convicted offenders in America, pivoted their business from face-to-face presentations to online courses quickly and easily thanks to HowToo. This essential transition was made possible by HowToo’s intuitive platform, course templates and flexibility. Civics Academy can now provide services in all 50 states, at any time, and now in both English and Spanish.

The challenges of face-to-face learning

Civics Academy works alongside the American judicial system to provide ethics and behavioral civics education to first and second time offenders. Civics Academy seeks to break cycles of reoffending while assisting participants in developing positive coping skills, encouraging education completion/gainful employment, and becoming productive assets within their communities.

For ten years, this training was delivered via in-person learning. This required students to attend physical locations at set times, and prevented the availability of multiple language options. This lack of flexibility reduced completion rates from participants, leading to an increased likelihood of reoffending.

Relying on face-to-face classes also acted as a barrier to Civics Academy’s business goal to scale their efforts across the country and expand their offerings with additional programs.“

We really wanted to scale into other counties and other states. We knew that face to face learning would have its limitations,” admits Civics Academy COO Caleb Morris.

“We knew that in order to reach our goals and our philosophy of being accessible, affordable and effective, we needed to find a partner that can provide us with an interactive, online platform for our participants.”

Achieving business goals through online learning

As they began to search for an online platform to transform their face-to-face sessions to online courses, the company’s CEO and founder Chip Morris immediately discovered the challenge of finding a platform that was easy and intuitive to use.

“Competitors, like Articulate, were very layered and challenging based on the technical aspects and overall cost,” Caleb recalls. “You’d basically need a masters degree to learn how to create the course.”

When they found HowToo, the decision was clear. “HowToo’s functionality, flexibility, customization, and ready-made blocks/templates allowed us to focus our time and energy on content creation.”

With no prior experience in eLearning, Caleb was initially nervous about the process of creating courses. These nerves quickly abated.

“HowToo was so intuitive. It was easy. I got to transfer all of our content seamlessly without having to do extra work. It has that right balance of providing templates and customization, without getting too technical.”

Within just a couple of months, Caleb was able to turn ten years of accumulated training into over 50 eLearning courses, including translating the entire curriculum into Spanish to better meet the needs of the community.

Scaling the business with HowToo

HowToo has been an incredible success for Civics Academy.

“HowToo has significantly improved our accessibility to clients, enhanced our effectiveness, and decreased our overhead to make our programs more bang for their buck!” Caleb shares.

By transitioning away from face-to-face learning, participants can now take their mandated courses anytime, anywhere. This has significantly increased completion rates by reducing the barriers of transportation, scheduling, classroom distractions and English language proficiency.

Furthermore, by removing the necessity for in-person presenters, Civics Academy’s programs are now available in every state, 24/7.

“With HowToo, we could easily send course links to the judges and prosecutors to see the Howtoo platform. They immediately said “This is what we need!” They know this program is actually effective,” says Caleb.

By using HowToo to transition to an online platform, Civics Academy has successfully approached judicial systems in other states to build new partnership opportunities.