Workplace excellence centers on transforming culture so teams can work better together. Our MicroVideo platform gives leaders a way to educate their employees in the natural flow of work. Don and the CrossComm team have been true partners in building the initial phase of our MicroVideos platform. They have acted as technical advisors to help us architect the future while managing the details to ensure we have a high-quality, functioning experience. They have acted as a seamless extension of our product team and we look forward to our continued work together.
Client
The Diversity Movement
Services
Web
In recent years, much attention has been given to the subject of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the workplace. Companies increasingly understand that prioritizing diverse and equitable workplaces is crucial to creativity, productivity and even brand perception. More importantly, it is a key social responsibility.
But many well-intentioned organizations soon realize that it is harder than they expected. They often don’t know how to take the first steps or where to get reliable information. They soon find that discovering, curating, and distributing resources to employees is a challenging and time-consuming task.
The Diversity Movement (TDM) wanted to build a web-based platform that would empower companies to easily provide DEI education to their employees in a custom, streamlined way. TDM had developed a catalog of over 600 original videos and sought to create a microlearning experience to showcase the product.
In order to scale the platform, they also needed each company to have a private portal to onboard and manage their organization’s users, and for usage data to be aggregated into company-scale analytics.
Our Approach
CrossComm created a custom backend interface to work with the off-the-shelf video platform, Vimeo OTT. Over-the-top (OTT) media services provide subscription based streaming content directly to consumers to make content easy to search and consume. Vimeo OTT allows brands, like TDM, to create their own subscription streaming platforms.
CrossComm built out a separate, lightweight backend using Node.js and Next.js to create the main onboarding hub for this platform. This approach provided three major advantages over simply creating an interface with Vimeo OTT: the ability to onboard employees en masse, aggregate company-scale analytics, and build on future modules and offerings.
Customized Packages and Streamlined Onboarding
Vimeo OTT is not designed to be used at a corporate, multi-user level. It’s instead built on a single-subscriber model and doesn’t allow brands to offer company-level or group subscriptions. This means a client couldn’t batch onboard employees, and would have to set up each account and its payment and privileges separately. Our team tackled this challenge by creating a backend that allows a TDM team member to upload a client’s roster of employees via a .csv file and create a custom set of MicroVideo carousels for that particular client. Each employee of that client then receives an email with login credentials that takes them to their company’s chosen videos on Vimeo OTT. This provides a cost-effective way to eliminate the need for TDM or their clients to individually set each employee's profile.
Client Progress Tracking and Usage Analytics Features
Another reason our team chose to build a central backend is to allow TDM the ability to track progress and analytics for their clients. Tracking usage analytics is important to companies as a first step to understanding what their employees are viewing and displaying key trends. As Vimeo OTT is built for individual users, there is no native way to aggregate user viewing data for a group of users within an organization.
To overcome this hurdle, our team wrote programming logic that ingests analytics and usage log files from Vimeo OTT, identifies which company each individual user's behavior is associated with, and sorts and aggregates the analytics for each company. TDM can then pull that data and provide their clients with useful information on their usage.
Developing a Full-Featured Microlearning Platform
From our early discussions with TDM, we knew they had the ultimate goal of moving beyond Vimeo and building out their own custom application platform with more elaborate features and offerings. This first iteration of their idea was mainly intended as a minimum viable product (MVP) to get clients in the door and enrolled in video training services. This early version would not only offer value to clients, it would also help to prove the efficacy of a content delivery platform around the subject of DEI.
The dedicated backend allows the microlearning platform to be built in a modular fashion from the start. This means that TDM can more easily expand on its feature set and incorporate future service modules such as a registration portal. By focusing on the needs of today, rather than trying to over engineer the product based on future aspirations, it allows the client to stay agile and lean and adjust as needs change. It’s a way of respecting the client’s current budget, while still planning for future phases and iterations in a strategic and efficient way.
Results
The platform was launched in the first quarter of 2022 and has been incorporated into TDM’s DEI Navigator offering. CrossComm and TDM are planning future roadmap items to integrate the platform into employee experience solutions.
The Diversity Movement’s MicroVideo platform was recognized by Fast Company as a 2022 World Changing Idea.
If you’re interested in taking the next step in your project or idea, we would love to hear from you and discuss whether CrossComm would be the right technology development team for you. Tell us more and receive a free assessment from CrossComm.