Make life easy for the people you rely on outside your organisation. 
Verify, educate, license and certify with a simple and practical training platform.  

Modules

Assessments

Scenarios

Simulations

Campaigns

Certification

Verifications

Integrations

Unison

Statistics NZ

NZ Police

Plumbers Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board

Eagar People

Health NZ

Trusted by industry leaders

Motivating busy external contractors, dealers, installers and practitioners is a challenge for traditional online learning. Use visual and interactive learning experiences, automated workflows and marketing strategies to grow a confident and capable eco-system. 

Verify, onboard and manage with integrated workflows

Practice real world scenarios with interactive simulations

Automate certification, licensing and CPD programmes

Power up the network

Ripple and Glass

Deliver flexible and adaptable training solutions to grow your customer and channel partner network. 

How it works

Use our simple authoring tools to create training modules, practice simulations and interactive learning experiences. 

How.io has everything you need to create stunning and accessible courses, guides and presentations.

Educate

Create visual and interactive training 

Glass

How.io delivers the right training, to the right people, at the right time with automated training workflows.

How.io keeps the adoption process moving with continuous and automated learning campaigns

Engage

Reach your audience

How.io workflows track engagement, record learning and collect documents for certification and automated compliance. 


How.io certification programmes give you confidence that users know how to stay safe and compliant when working with new technology.

Record

Verify, license and certify

Integrate with your systems and connect opportunities. Receive payments, store records and create seamless experiences from your website and other platforms.

Plug in your platforms

The customer: The Plumbers, Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board

The Plumbers, Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board are the regulators for tradespeople working in the industry. The Board sets the standards for registration and ensures workers are competent to carry out regulated work in order to safeguard the health and safety of people, their property and the environment.

Annual Continuous Professional Development (CPD) is a key requirement for registration. CPD keeps practitioners up-to-date with changes in regulation, processes, and new products and technology.

The Board needed a solution for online CPD training for those that could not attend training in-person. Key requirements were:

·	A user-friendly experience that integrates into their existing site.

·	Simple and easy-to-use platform that can cater to those with limited online training experience.

·	Mobile-friendly, interactive and intuitive training that effectively educates practitioners about new technology and processes.

·	Training to fit in with busy practitioners’ schedules, including the ability to pause and come back to training.

The How.io Solution: A practical and Integrated approach

How.io provided the perfect solution to meet the Board’s requirements.

How-io’s simple authoring tools and advanced functionality enabled the team to use existing content and create engaging, visual learning modules that simplified complex concepts.

The Board worked with subject matter experts and a designer to condense a 2 hour roadshow presentation into a simple but powerful learning experience on How.io.

A CPD consisting of interactive slides, images, quizzes and videos was created and delivered to the practitioners.

How-io enabled the training to be accessible, easy-to-use and fast to load.

The How.io API was integrated into the existing practitioner site with an innovative Single Sign On solution so practitioners could easily complete the training from a website they already use.

Mobile-friendly and modern training for busy practitioners

The CPD training was mobile-friendly and designed to feel more like social media than Elearning. A simple interface made it easy for non-technical users to focus on content, rather than work out how to drive the application.

How.io allowed practitioners to pause whenever they wanted to and close the browser. To carry on where they left off, they could simply click on the button in the practitioner site or reopen the link.

The takeaways: Practitioners like it to be simple and relevant

A survey was conducted with the near 6,000 practitioners who had completed the How.io powered online CPD training. 77.5% of respondents found it easy to access with 93% completing the modules.

The most popular sections were around the code updates and changes to regulations. Practitioners want to stay up to date with the changes that affect their jobs. Practitioners said they found online CPD training a good alternative to in-person roadshows, with 78% saying they would choose online next year.

See how we helped the industry regulator introduce new technology including Hydrogen and innovative new boilers to New Zealand.

CPD for plumbers, gasfitters and drainlayers

See how we helped the industry regulator automate their CPD programme with an interactive training portal integrated with their website and CRM. 

Plumbers, Gas Fitters and Drainlayers Board

How.io has everything you need to ensure your partners and customers get the best out of your products.  Create product education that sells and certify people with the know-how. 

Manufacturers

How.io helps you build capability across your membership and accelerate the adoption of new technology. Create interactive training programs, practice simulations and collaborate with industry to raise the game for everyone. 

Associations

Accelerate product adoption with How.io. Roll out new technology to customers and partners with ease.

Vendors

Use cases

Organizations have a range of motivations for reaching, engaging and educating an external audience. Often it's to raise awareness of new products or opportunities as well as information that could be relevant for safety or legal reasons. 

External audiences have a multitude reasons to engage with an organizations educational offering, they may wish to improve their skills and provide more value to their customers. They may wish to explore their capability to work with a new product or technology.

Manufacturers and vendors often rely on external partners to sell, maintain or install products. They may need to train and certify the people they trust to deliver with their brand and reputation. Associations and authorities who license individuals need to be confident that people are who they say they are and are capable of delivering a compliant service. The value of a certification or association membership needs to be maintained with a strong reputation.

Often growth of an organisation or industry is limited by confidence and capability out in the real world. People tend to stick with what they know and for new products, processes or techniques to thrive - there needs to be opportunities to learn. Education is a way to accelerate growth in both revenue and industry size.

Traditional learning platforms are designed for mandated internal employees. They can be required by their employer to log into an LMS and complete some training modules. They are often given time to do this at work, provided with the means and reminded by their manager to complete the assigned learning.

External audiences often don’t have these luxuries and generally don’t have to complete the training if it doesn’t suit them. There are many great courses in LMSs with lots of licences assigned to an external audience who either never logged in or had a quick look and never came back. 

Practitioners, partners and operators outside your organisation need to be motivated to learn in other ways. Some will learn because they need to know something to complete a task, others may take the lead in their own professional development with things that interest them. 

Organizations have limited opportunities to influence a learning journey if the individual doesn’t already engage with the organisation or have a good reason to.

To reach these audiences, you need to steal from marketing and make people aware they have a problem that your training can help solve.

Marketing departments use a number of strategies to target and reach audiences, make them aware of new opportunities and motivate them to engage.


Marketing departments recognize their audience is rarely homogenous and some messages can resonate better with some sections of the audience. They group their audience based on a range of factors and tailor their messaging to suit. There are limited opportunities to connect with a target audience and the message needs to be as relevant and on point. 

In a training context, you want your audience to understand some key things and meet some desired outcomes. With internal audiences, you are clear on who they are and can mandate training - so relevance is less important. 

With external audiences, it’s important to focus on the necessary details and avoid anything that isn’t relevant. The content needs to be optimized and personalised to make sense for the target audience. 



Marketers often know that when you need to deliver a complicated message or explain something in detail - you need to get someone's attention with a hook first. If you overload or present too much information people lose interest really quickly. 

Hooks are visual, short pieces of content that trigger a response or pique interest in the target audience. Training modules for internal staff are often large pieces of content that cover a lot of bases. Unless audiences are very aware they need to complete the module, they’re unlikely to engage on their own volition.

A hook to encourage someone to engage with some training is making them aware they don’t fully know the subject or might have some gaps in their knowledge. Short challenges, quizzes or scenarios can motivate someone to acquire deeper knowledge when they know what it is they don’t already know. 



Marketing campaigns are multiple messages, delivered over time to a target audience. The idea is to repeat and reinforce the theme of the campaign to have more chance of resonating with the audience. Often a single message or piece of information has a limited chance to have impact, but broken up and delivered over time can lead to better outcomes.

You may have experienced that after signing up for an online service you start receiving hints or advice in regular emails - that is a learning campaign. The learning campaign is designed by the marketing team to drive adoption of the service and encourage engagement.  

For training, the same concept can be applied. Breaking up longer courses into smaller bite size modules can make them easier to digest. They can be presented consequently for those who are engaged, or sent in emails delivered as a drip to the inbox over time. 


You can use training workflows to implement these strategies in your educational programmes. Workflows enable you to customize delivery and adapt the content to suit your audience. 


Use group nodes to group your audience so they can be assigned relevant content further along the flow. You can use a number of methods to determine which group someone should belong to, this can include working it out from where they came, which country they live in, answers to questions or other factors.Audience members can be added to multiple groups and removed if required as part of a workflow. Modules can be added, removed or modified for particular groups to optimize the content and maximize relevance. 



Use short and engaging modules as part of a hook, to give someone a challenge and make them aware of what they don’t know. You can use parts of longer modules to encourage someone to engage. Use short scenarios, quizzes and simulations that challenge the audience and can be completed quickly. 

The introduction text can be in an email or social media post to be the first hook that can then load a short and visual module. You can also screen record some video from the module to get attention. The audience can continue in the workflow to the rest of the module or longer version, or be sent further emails or notifications. 



To create a drip to an inbox with short learning content, use module nodes with notification delays. Determine the right cadence for your audience to deliver enough nudges and notifications without getting too annoying.You can add interactions inside emails to prompt engagement, including selecting answers to a quiz. Use images that visually demonstrate the learning objective or set the scene to raise interest. 

You can measure engagement, click through rates and group memberships to establish workflow performance and reach. The workflow stats can tell you where you get bottle necks, if content isn’t hitting the mark and where your audience falls off. 

You can continuously improve and optimize to show the most relevant content to your audience groups and remove anything that is causing them to lose interest. You can adjust cadences for the drip to allow enough time between emails or raise the tempo if you feel the audience is engaged. 

As you get to know your audience you will be able to identify segments and groups who may need more or less training on certain subjects depending on their requirements. There may be parts of your solution that will resonate more, so you can adjust the learning flow for those individuals for a greater impact.

You have a range of options you can use to reach and engage your target external audience. Good luck! 

To engage external audiences you need a different approach. Steal from marketing and use workflows to implement your strategy.

Marketing strategies for training

Get the training platform your audience deserves

You don’t always need a learning team to deliver training programmes. Collaborate to engage and inspire your audiences with our tried and tested methodology. 

Services

We're passionate about changing industries through the adoption of new technology and processes. 


About

How.io is a training platform for engaging and educating external audiences, including customers, partners and members.  

Education for growth