Refresher & Skills Enhancement Training
The Situation
A major CRM implementation — a platform widely used across higher education and nonprofit advancement offices — had been rolled out across Harvard’s Advancement office with an extensive initial training program. A year later, a familiar and predictable pattern had emerged.
Staff remembered some of what they’d learned. They’d forgotten more. And for those who had retained the core training, there was an entire layer of functionality they’d never been exposed to — features that could have made their work faster, more accurate, and more insightful, if only they knew it existed.
This isn’t a failure of initial training. It’s the nature of learning at scale: when the system is complex, when the training happens before people have real context for what they’ll need, and when daily work pulls people away from practice, retention erodes. The question wasn’t how to fix the original training. It was how to build something that addressed the reality of what happens after.
The Design Insight
Two distinct but related needs had to be served simultaneously. For staff who had forgotten, the program needed to refresh and reinforce what they’d already learned. For staff who were proficient, it needed to open new doors — advanced features, emerging capabilities, and skills that went beyond the system itself.
And it needed to do both without asking staff to sit through content they didn’t need. The solution was modularity: short, targeted, standalone sessions that staff could choose based on their own proficiency level and priorities, fitting learning into their workweek rather than pulling them out of it for days at a time.
The Approach
Refresh Week was designed as an annual intensive — a concentrated week of live, modular instructor-led sessions delivered by a team of educators and subject matter experts. With 15–20 sessions offered across the week, staff could build their own learning agenda: attending the sessions most relevant to their role and current skill level, skipping what they already knew, and going deep where they wanted to grow.
The content spanned two categories. Evergreen sessions — including Excel skills that had proven so valuable in other programs — provided consistent, reliable foundations that staff could return to year after year as their teams turned over and new colleagues came on board. New content addressed emerging needs: updated system features, process changes, and evolving best practices that kept the program fresh and responsive to what was actually happening in the office.
What distinguished Refresh Week wasn’t just its content. It was its design philosophy: meet staff where they are, give them agency over their own learning, and make the experience worth choosing. That philosophy proved itself in the results.
Due to the program’s reach and impact, the content expanded over time to include professional development skills — courses on topics like time management that served staff’s broader growth, not just their system proficiency. Refresh Week had become something larger than a CRM training program. It had become a learning culture.
That culture generated its own momentum. The success of Refresh Week led directly to the creation of a second program: Summer Blockbusters & Summer Shorts — a 5–6 week summer series that brought the same modular, staff-driven approach to a different point in the calendar year. Its reception mirrored Refresh Week’s exactly: high demand, enthusiastic participation, and a waiting list that confirmed the appetite for learning hadn’t diminished between annual programs.
The Outcome
Demand exceeded expectations from the first year and never stopped. Registration filled on the first day it opened — every year, for the life of the program. Annual attendance surpassed 800 seats, with staff returning year after year and recommending the program to colleagues new and old.
What began as a response to post-implementation attrition became one of the most valued professional development offerings in the Advancement office — proof that when learning is designed around what people actually need, and delivered in a way that respects their time and intelligence, they will show up for it.
The Situation
A major CRM implementation — a platform widely used across higher education and nonprofit advancement offices — had been rolled out across Harvard’s Advancement office with an extensive initial training program. A year later, a familiar and predictable pattern had emerged.
Staff remembered some of what they’d learned. They’d forgotten more. And for those who had retained the core training, there was an entire layer of functionality they’d never been exposed to — features that could have made their work faster, more accurate, and more insightful, if only they knew it existed.
This isn’t a failure of initial training. It’s the nature of learning at scale: when the system is complex, when the training happens before people have real context for what they’ll need, and when daily work pulls people away from practice, retention erodes. The question wasn’t how to fix the original training. It was how to build something that addressed the reality of what happens after.
The Design Insight
Two distinct but related needs had to be served simultaneously. For staff who had forgotten, the program needed to refresh and reinforce what they’d already learned. For staff who were proficient, it needed to open new doors — advanced features, emerging capabilities, and skills that went beyond the system itself.
And it needed to do both without asking staff to sit through content they didn’t need. The solution was modularity: short, targeted, standalone sessions that staff could choose based on their own proficiency level and priorities, fitting learning into their workweek rather than pulling them out of it for days at a time.
The Approach
Refresh Week was designed as an annual intensive — a concentrated week of live, modular instructor-led sessions delivered by a team of educators and subject matter experts. With 15–20 sessions offered across the week, staff could build their own learning agenda: attending the sessions most relevant to their role and current skill level, skipping what they already knew, and going deep where they wanted to grow.
The content spanned two categories. Evergreen sessions — including Excel skills that had proven so valuable in other programs — provided consistent, reliable foundations that staff could return to year after year as their teams turned over and new colleagues came on board. New content addressed emerging needs: updated system features, process changes, and evolving best practices that kept the program fresh and responsive to what was actually happening in the office.
What distinguished Refresh Week wasn’t just its content. It was its design philosophy: meet staff where they are, give them agency over their own learning, and make the experience worth choosing. That philosophy proved itself in the results.
Due to the program’s reach and impact, the content expanded over time to include professional development skills — courses on topics like time management that served staff’s broader growth, not just their system proficiency. Refresh Week had become something larger than a CRM training program. It had become a learning culture.
That culture generated its own momentum. The success of Refresh Week led directly to the creation of a second program: Summer Blockbusters & Summer Shorts — a 5–6 week summer series that brought the same modular, staff-driven approach to a different point in the calendar year. Its reception mirrored Refresh Week’s exactly: high demand, enthusiastic participation, and a waiting list that confirmed the appetite for learning hadn’t diminished between annual programs.
The Outcome
Demand exceeded expectations from the first year and never stopped. Registration filled on the first day it opened — every year, for the life of the program. Annual attendance surpassed 800 seats, with staff returning year after year and recommending the program to colleagues new and old.
What began as a response to post-implementation attrition became one of the most valued professional development offerings in the Advancement office — proof that when learning is designed around what people actually need, and delivered in a way that respects their time and intelligence, they will show up for it.