How we built binge-worthy courses for Lancify
Abysmal ed-tech completion rates throughout the world have been a problem many have tried to solve. Lancify came to us looking to build engaging, value-packed, stylized courses. The intent was to blur the lines between education and entertainment; to teach a TikTok-ing, Youtube-ing, Netflix-binging generation.
Judging by the resulting 55% completion rate, it was a success.
The Brand
Lancify is an ed-tech startup that enables young people to make themselves freelance-ready by acquiring new-age, relevant skills. The company was founded in 2019 and raised $300k in seed investment.
Lancify Learn, their educational vertical, was created with this very vision — to teach students skills that are immediately applicable. Each course had to be binge-worthy while carrying enough depth for anyone to start practicing within a month. The skills taught — and their corresponding tools — are distinct in that they are all digital and in-demand for the future of work.
Problem Statement
There was an array of issues Lancify was trying to solve through these courses. We spoke at length with the founders to get to the root of the problems they were trying to solve, narrowing them down to 3 main areas:
1. Relevance of knowledge taught at a college level (employability)
2. Applicability of knowledge/tools (practicality)
3. Average ed-tech completion rate.
Here’s a deeper look into each of these.
Employability — are Indian youth being trained well enough, in new-age, relevant skills, to land themselves a job post graduating?
The data on this is concerning. A report by the Centre for Sustainable Employment at Azim Premji University found that unemployment among the well-educated is thrice the national average. There are about 55 million people in the labor market with at least a graduate degree — of which 9 million are estimated to be unemployed (as of April 2021).
It isn’t hard to trace the cause.
“If you go over the syllabus of ten Indian colleges that provide you with a marketing degree, nowhere will you find a single mention of Hubspot, one of the leading global inbound marketing tools. Nor will you find a mention of Google Analytics or Mailchimp or Facebook Business Manager or Salesforce or UberSuggest. These are all tools that most companies — especially in these times — use every single day”.
— Rachna, Brand Manager, Lancify.
Students rote-learn pages of theory and regurgitate it during exams to garner their marketing degrees. They’re experts on paper but are rendered clueless upon entering the job market.
So, what does it really mean to be an expert?
Through our conversations with Lancify, we learned that education systems, even today, aren't adept enough to be teaching young students applicable skills of real market value.
The second issue was practicality.
Along with Lancify, we learned that it was imperative that these courses left students with immediately applicable knowledge.
A student who completes the course should be able to take on a client soon after — the course must leave them freelance-ready. In order to do that, we needed to make sure the courses followed a playbook methodology — the course should cover strategies from the very start of a project, right until handover.
Lastly, completion.
If the students needed to be equipped to take on clients, they needed to complete the course. This, however, wasn’t as straightforward as it seemed.
Ed-tech completion rates across the globe have been floating in and around single digits. If Lancify’s vision were to become a reality, these numbers wouldn’t work.
The challenge, then, was to make each episode engaging and entertaining enough that people could binge-watch the entire course within hours.
With the problems clear, we needed to form solutions keeping the target audience in mind — young millennials and Gen-Z, i.e. people whose attention spans are limited, to say the least.
Our Approach
The first thing on our list was to speak to young people, both within the team and externally. The task was to understand what kind of content they watched voluntarily — what kind of education did they find entertaining?
The responses pointed us in the right direction: Vox and Hasan Minhaj. For these creators, it was humor, relatability, and their dynamic design that engaged their audience.
That, along with their deep understanding of subject matter — the statements made were to-the-point; holding value and demanding attention. The shows were also balanced, with visuals supplementing the teaching, never overpowering it.
With our inspirations in place, we realized we needed to focus on these main things: storyline, humor, motion design, and a human connection.
The Work
1. Scripting and Development
Our production assembly-line began with receiving the script from the Knowledge Providers (KPs). These were subject-matter experts, such as FishHook, Mad Over Marketing, and Shopify. Their writing served as the first draft.
Once we received the script, we had to make it course-ready.
At a high level, it needed to be thematically organized into chapters and episodes. Our goal was to take the viewer on a journey so that the sequence of ideas made logical sense. Then, we tacked the specifics.
We went over the scripts with a fine-toothed comb, editing for length, sentence structure, grammar, and so on. We did this while ensuring it sounded more like a conversation, and less like a monologue.
A big part of our process was adding humour. Some scripts were bookish, which was exactly what we needed to change. At this stage, we wrote jokes and unsuspecting quips, keeping it lighthearted for the viewer.
“Tension and release” was our mantra — comic relief after a long, heavy paragraph.
We worked closely with the KPs themselves during this process so that their individuality was not compromised in the script’s voice and tone. We ensured their comfort and ease with our humour, structure, interpretations, and references.
2. Creative Direction
Once we had a final script in place, we moved on to what we call Creative Direction (CD).
This part of the process was to put down what the viewer would see throughout the course — how examples would be depicted, what visual humour would be added, and how the content on screen would complement the voiceover.
After dividing the scripts into blocks, our creative team visualized how best to depict those ideas, weaving a visual narrative into the course.
Our primary aims with this were a) to have frequent movement on-screen, b) do visual justice to the course material, and c) include visual humour in all the right spots.
Our creative direction had to heed short attention spans. We used a combination of text, imagery, original animations, gifs, as well as memes to create an engaging visual experience.
We also used templates to fit broad themes. We did this to familiarize the audience with the big ideas we were communicating, without getting lost in the details.
3. Voiceover Recording
Carrying on from our lighthearted, conversational approach to scripting, we thought it best that the voiceover not just embody this, but also level it up. Our idea was for the voiceover to sound like a friend explaining concepts to another friend, rather than a professor dictating off a textbook, or a typical voice-over artist.
As the voiceover formed the backbone of the course, we ensured it was high-quality output, stressing pronunciation and diction. We made sure it sounded full, and had body, along with cutting out any harsh frequencies.
4. Motion Designing
Before moving on to video production, it was important that we translated Lancify’s visual identity seamlessly with these videos. After a thorough analysis of the brand, we designed the look and feel of the videos, templates, colours, font hierarchy, logo animation, and so on.
We also used these templates across courses, so even with changing KPs, the aesthetic of the course remained consistent.
Each course has a slightly different colour scheme, keeping in mind the tool being taught.
5. Live-Action Trailers & Outros
Through our references, we learned while motion graphics along with images, gifs, would be engaging, they lacked the humanness required for genuine connection. With the quirky voiceover and visuals in place, attaching a face to it seemed like it would seal the deal.
For every course, ee decided on an intro and outro video featuring the KPs.
The intro needed to: a) compel the user to make a purchase, b) provide an overview of the course and c) allow for the learner to establish a connection with the instructor.
These ideas guided our scripting, set designing and execution of the intro. We also ensured that these were written and shot in a way that could be repurposed for other marketing materials: trailers, ads, and social media posts.
6. Sound Design
The intro and outro music was selected to be young and fresh considering the target audience, while still maintaining subtlety and elegance.
To complement witticisms in the scripts, or accent a joke, bits of quirky music were sprinkled in. Particularly for humour, familiar auditory references were made. Vines, viral Tiktoks, Bollywood numbers, and the like. However, we added these in with utmost subtlety, avoiding anything remotely tacky, so that nothing interfered with the voiceover.
Responses
The feedback we’ve received from the viewers and the brand has overwhelmed us.
These testimonials serve as affirmations that the identified pain-points were accurate and representative. They also point to how engaging the courses were — users cited the term “binge-watch” several times across platforms.
Score.
Lancify’s 55% completion rate is testament to this: focusing on your target audience and building a product for them. Speak to your consumer, understand their interests, watch the things they like to watch, and then build.
Finally, in the words of Gowtham Sundaresan, Co-founder of Lancify:
Working with BCKDRP has been an absolute pleasure! Their creativity is profound, and they’re very easy to work with. Accommodating of the ever-changing needs of a startup whilst changing up their internal processes accordingly, they will do anything it takes to get the job done, and done well.
They’re especially great at understanding and appealing to Gen-Z/young millennials. Highly recommend BCKDRP to anyone looking for a bunch of crazy creatives who deliver results.
