The Evolution of Brook Learn: How digital learning can boost charity engagement

For #SHW23, we’re Playing It Safe. In this blog, Kat Rose Baldwin, co-founder and Managing Director of Eggu, an award winning digital learning agency, tells the story of how Eggu and Brook have worked together to create Brook Learn, an online learning platform for educators and professionals working with young people.

Making the leap to digital

At the start of our journey in 2015, all of Brook’s education work was delivered face-to-face.

Understandably, this was restricted to areas with a strong physical presence, which meant a limited reach, a high cost of delivery and at times, inconsistency of messaging. Brook were also generating limited data to monitor education and training engagement and successes.

The vision was for an e-learning platform (Brook Learn), hosting design-led and interactive digital learning resources, which any teacher could access for free, safe in the knowledge that the relationships and sex education (RSE) content they were accessing was high quality, written by experts and reliably evidence-based.

Boosting teacher skills and confidence

Now, we can only imagine how daunting presenting tricky and sometimes sensitive topics to young people can be, whether this be around puberty, contraception, STIs, consent, abortion or even pleasure.

Our intention was to normalise conversations around sex and relationships, dispel anxieties and arm professionals with the information and assets they need to deliver a confident and effective session.

Let’s be honest – if teachers feel discomfort or embarrassment by the content – how could RSE ever become mainstream? How would their students ever feel able to turn to them if they were having problems with their health or relationships?

Promoting Brook

We also saw this as a golden opportunity to really position Brook as experts in their field, raise their profile and presence, and attract a new, perhaps unfamiliar audience that may be driven to other services on offer at Brook, as a result of their engagement.

Consistency is key

Although the face-to-face sessions available from Brook were extremely valuable, consistency of content delivery in training is essential.

Let’s face it – bad or wrong information could be disastrous.

So, moving core educational materials online provided Brook with a lot more control.

Award-winning design and development

Everything we create is completely bespoke and in line with Brook’s bold, vibrant brand guidelines.

Each project is designed with versatile modes of delivery and include a variety of features to inform and engage users, including:

• Pre and post surveys
• Interactive and reflective activities
• Quizzing to test user knowledge
• Powerful storytelling through videos
• Branded, instructional animations

Whether e-learning courses, online seminars, downloadable resources or video and animated content – together, we have created a growing suite of digital learning tools on topics spanning puberty, STIs, gender, sexual harassment, safeguarding, contraception, and even pleasure.

We’ve even won awards for our ground-breaking project on Consent, with versions for both teachers and university students that addresses some shocking real-life experiences and equips young people to have safe, ethical and enjoyable sexual experiences.

Celebrating the impact

Year on year, we have seen a consistent increase in engagement with Brook Learn, with a huge spike at the time of the introduction of mandatory RSE in 2020 and during lockdown.

Today, we now have over 32,000 users registered to Brook Learn, and the rate of growth continues to rise.

And now Brook can easily track user enrolment and activity data to boot, all of which helps to direct future updates and new releases.

In all cases, we have seen an increase in user knowledge and confidence after completing Brook digital learning, with the majority of users ranking the online training as easy to access, useful, relevant, engaging and well-structured.

Brook Learn has not only helped to build brand awareness but has introduced the charity to whole new markets, with users in almost all local authority areas in the UK.

Furthermore, it has unlocked the opportunity to develop paid for content and market new education products to a growing list of subscribers.

Making change happen

We proudly stand shoulder to shoulder with Brook as they fight and campaign for RSE to meet the needs of today’s young people.

We’re here to support the disruptors, boundary pushers and world changers – all of which Brook most certainly are.