My philosophy on notifications: LESS IS MORE. 

I want people to read LMS emails, so I’ll send “User has been enrolled to course” for mandatory training. I’ll outline the expiration date and link to the course. 

I also like to have my home page consist of upcoming deadlines Task List widget, so that this is top of mind when they log in. 

For live sessions, I have “User has been enrolled into a session”, so that people can add the event to their calendars. 

Other commonly used ones are “Learner has yet to complete this course”, which is helpful for reminders on important mandatory training that’s expiring. 

I also rely on my managers to push deadlines to their team too, since they have report access to see if they have outstanding team members. 

If you have courses you’re advertising/suggesting, so that people log back in, you can create those one-off messages with the newsletter. Also, this is great to advertise on the home page too, so anyone logging in can see what’s new or pressing to take. 

What do you think? 

great post, I was thinking about starting a similar one!

We’ve got a lot of courses which would mean a lot of notifications, so instead of using standard “User enrolled in a course” and “Learner has yet to complete the course” we use the “Digest” versions of them - it allows you to avoid spamming users with multiple notifications and just collects all enrollments and all reminders and then sends them in a single email.

The downside of “Digest: user enrolled in a course” is that the notification is not going to go out right away but in general, it’s much, much better for new-starters if you have auto-enrollments (via enrollment rules).

Aside from that we use notifications for gamification (approved / rejected rewards) and some notifications for our Channels (new question to expert, new asset to review, new answer for a question).

We are currently in a similar position and are trying to decide what notifications we should send, how often to send them, who to send them to, and importantly how exactly they all work.

So far the only one we have completely agreed on is “User enrolled in a course” for mandatory training courses. 

We believe that our employees will be more likely to read and engage with the notifications if they are customised using html - this means a lot more work for the team, but we think it will be worth it in the long run.

Is anyone else customising their notifications, or is everyone just using the system generated ones/plain text?

I am a new user of Docebo, using it for last 2-3 months but I was thinking about very similar approach as @abartunek presented. I am creating a lot short “how to” courses - about internal systems and uploading them into a different Course Catalogues, so people can enrol themselves whenever they want. Instead of sending emails about new courses (people are getting too many emails daily so they are not able to read all of them) I promote them by using banners in the platform’s home page or/and intranet. 

I also like the @josefinarod idea with the Task List widget, have to consider how that would work for me. 

First, glad I am not alone in this.  It’s never easy trying to balance the need for information and overloading inboxes.  After too many emails from ‘training’ they will start to be ignored - right, we all know that.

Secondly, thank you all for replying.  As we continue to leverage the tools in the system, this gives me valuable ideas and even supports some of my thoughts.

Keep it going...

@liam.finnegan I love to start with the templates, and customize from there, it’s less work. I create a notification for “User has been created”, for example. Then I copy the “Source Code”, which has the HTML template & I reuse this in all the other ones. It’s definitely a great start, compared to plain text. 

Are you using any tools to build out the HTML? 

@josefinarod That makes sense, I will speak with the team and ask them to think about that as an alternative, especially for future notifications if we use them to a small group of people for Digests, or Admin related notifications.

When creating our HTML templates, we are typically using Adobe Illustrator to create a bespoke header/footer and any imagery or icons to be used in the body, then Adobe Dreamweaver to put it all together. Then we copy the HTML and paste it into the “Source Code” field of the notification.

It works well and creates really nice notifications, it’s just time consuming. We have started to experiment with creating a generic header/footer for ‘topics’ of training, then using the Docebo Short Codes to customise them for individual courses, sessions etc. and that seems to work well and reduce time spent on them.

@JeanetteMcVeigh We also use the same User is enrolled in a Course and User is enrolled in a live session notifications. We have found that our users pay more attention to the notification when the receive them via email rather than an in-system notification (most of our clients are external and are not regularly in Docebo, so the email notifications help bring them back into the platform).

@liam.finnegan we also follow @josefinarod ‘s method with customizing the notification.  We create a notification, copy the source code and then we used Adobe Dreamweaver to help us customize a standard header and footer that goes on all the notifications. Then with each notification we add simple text provide about how to troubleshoot or who to contact if they have any questions. 

Great thread going here and I agree with much of what’s already been said.  We’re struggling with how to be informative without being annoying.

I’ve added a new idea in the ideas portal for more notification digests e.g. for forums and sharing activity, if you’re interested head over there and vote for it (please!).

Joanna

@joanna.lay Is it Idea number LMS-I-3618?  Just voted that one up. 

What would be great is sort of like a ‘task wizard’ for admins.  
For instance “Enrol users in a course/catalogue” wizard can walk you through the steps of enrolling the user in the course/catalogue and then ask the admin about other “typical things” that would support this event.

1. What users should be included?
2. What course/catalogues should be included?
3. Do you need to send emails? If yes, who should receive them? user, manager, etc.. Then based upon those answers take you/show you/set up a task for you (the admin) to finish.
4. Do you need any reports? and so on…
5. Do you use the Task List widget to display what is to be done? If not, don’t forget xxxx

Something like that would be very useful for newer admins (and veteran admins)...of course with the option to ignore the ‘task wizard’ as well.

I know this is not easy to create and implement, but was just wishing for something like this...thoughts?

Yes, that’s the one - sorry, I should have included the number...it was the end of a very long day 

We do light customizations by adding an image and our own text. We also use short codes for the course, learning plan, etc.

It’s smart to spend time researching the notification options and coming up with a plan. We still struggle a bit with the right notifications for our setup. It’s very easy to spam your learners with notifications--which we learned the hard way. We serve up content most often in Learning Plans. If we add a new course into an assigned Learning Plan learners would get two notifications for the same event if we had both the new course and new content in Learning Plan notifications enabled. If we use just the Learning Plan one, then individual courses don’t trigger notifications and if we use just the course one, learners get 5 notifications if we have 5 courses in a new learning plan. There’s no way to have one notification take precedence over another.