Live online as the default
For a distributed charity the cost and travel arithmetic makes remote delivery the sensible default rather than the compromise.
Canadian Cancer Society
The Canadian Cancer Society is named as a PowerConcepts client on our services page. This page is about training a distributed charity.
- Sector
- National charity
- Based in
- National, with regional offices across Canada
A national charity has the distribution problem of a large company and the budget scrutiny of a small one. Staff and volunteers are spread across regions, turnover is higher than in the private sector, and every dollar spent on overhead is a dollar not spent on the mission — which is a reasonable test and one that training should be able to pass.
Live online delivery is usually the right answer on both counts. Nobody travels, sessions can be split into shorter blocks that fit around programme work, and the cost per participant is a fraction of on-site delivery. The one-year free retake matters here more than in almost any other sector, because it means training a role rather than a person: when the post turns over, the successor can take the same course at no additional cost.
The material that gets asked for is usually collaboration rather than analysis. Where the files are, which version is current, how a distributed group works on the same document without four copies of it — the Teams and OneDrive material. Excel comes up for the finance and grant-reporting side, where the reporting cycle is fixed and repetitive and therefore very automatable.
What tends to work for organisations like this
Training the role, not the person
With volunteer and staff turnover, the free retake window means a successor can take the same course at no extra cost — worth factoring into how a programme is scoped.
Grant reporting is a reporting problem
Funder reporting is fixed-format and recurring, which makes it one of the better candidates for the refreshable-report approach taught in Advanced Data Management.
What this page does not say
It does not report what Canadian Cancer Society was trained on, how many people took part, or what it saved them. Those numbers have not been published and we are not going to invent them — a fabricated result attributed to a real organisation is worse than a page with a gap in it.
Canadian Cancer Society is named as a client on our services page, which is a claim the business already makes about itself. Everything above that line is about the shape of the problem rather than about this engagement. The index page explains the policy in full.
The relevant training
For an organisation of this shape the material that usually matters most is Teams training. How it gets delivered depends on where people are: On-site training, Live online training or Excel for teams.