British Council

We worked with RazorSocial 3 years in a row doing an advanced social media upskilling certification progamme for over 100 Staff across 15 countries. People in the company are still talking about it!

What Was The Project About?

British Council is United Kingdom's international organisation for cultural relations and educational opportunities and has over 20,000 employees across 100 countries.

They have many millions of fans and followers across social media and wanted to raise their game to the next level.

They wanted in person training, online training and a certificate at the end for their staff. This program was so successful they ran it 3 years in a row. Employees on the program grew a strong social media presence, some were promoted for their enhanced skills and some went on to flourishing careers in social media.

What Was Our Involvement In The Project?

The head of social media globally (David Blundell) hired us to evaluate the social media skills of 30 people from 15 countries and then to build out a program to bring their skills up to the next level.

The challenge with this project was the team in British Council were already a group of skilled social media professionals. Most of the social accounts already had hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions of followers.

So...basic training was not going to suffice!

Also… David wanted it to be quite practical.

Together with David we built out an excellent program. This was really a great team effort involving us and David and there’s no way it would have been as successful if David was not involved! On projects like this we see ourselves as additional members of your team not an external team!

The program consisted of:

3 Day In Person Session In Dublin

30 people flew in from 15 different countries around the world.

We planned out the program and did some of the training but we also brought in some of the top experts in Digital Marketing to help. For example, Kim Garst.

Online Training

After the session in Dublin we completed 8 online sessions after they went home

Each session was about 90 minutes each and there was work to be completed after each session.

Certification

There was then a joint RazorSocial (We recently changed the company name to RazorSpire) and British Council certification

This was awarded to participants that attended the majority of the training and successfully delivered the project work that was reviewed.

What Were The Results?

  • A large group of participants on the training benefited so well from the skills that some of them got promoted to more senior social media roles
  • The British Council social media presence improved in so many different areas – from brand to delivery to data analysis. They have a current global audience of 44 million + fans, followers and subscribers and it’s growing all the time
  • The project was so successful it was run 3 years in a row

I can’t recommend Ian and the RazorSpire team highly enough. They built and delivered a world-class certificated social media course from scratch and over 100 of my staff worldwide have benefited from the Digital Skills they learned. All the people who attended one of the courses never fail to mention how much they benefitted from it and it has greatly helped to raise the standard of our social media management across all the skills. Thanks Ian!

David Blundell

Head of Global Social Media, British Council

Have you got a similar project?

Do you want to evaluate the skills of the team you have in place, hire for new roles or want to run a digital upskilling program for your team?

Or maybe you represent a lot of companies and want to do an evaluation of skills and build out a program to improve?