From time to time I'd like to use this blog to remind our customers of some of the great but lesser known features available in Brainshark. Today I thought I would start with Question Branching.

Some use cases may include:

• Sales & Marketing -- You have a suite of products or services and you want identify what the prospect is most interested in and direct them accordingly.
• Training -- A student incorrectly answers a question and you'd like to direct them back to the content to review it again.
• HR Onboarding -- You want to direct a new employee to complete forms that are relevant to them, so you may want to ask them questions about their interest in participating in certain program offerings.

These are just a few of the ways that you might use Question Branching. Based on their response to a question, you can redirect viewers to another point in the same presentation, to an entirely new Brainshark presentation, or to a designated URL.

You are able to set-up branching when adding or editing a question in your presentation.  In the example below, I have chosen to branch the viewer to a different point in my presentation that corresponds to the product offering in which they are most interested:

For more information on using questions and branching in Brainshark, please click here.

Kristin

p.s. Do you have some suggestions for features you'd like to see discussed on our product blog? If so, please email the product team with your feedback.

The Special Olympics World Winter Games, a Brainshark nonprofit grant customer, is featured in today's Wall St. Journal!  The WSJ article "Helping Themselves" describes how nonprofits are cutting costs and raising revenues in the midst of fewer donations and declining investment --- and we're thrilled to be mentioned!  Games organizers used Brainshark to reduce costly in-person training. 

See the presentation that was used to train 5,000 volunteers:

If you are involved in a nonprofit, whether it's your full time job or your passion outside of work, visit the our non-profit page to learn how Brainshark can be used to cost-effectively raise awareness, train volunteers, recruit members, raise funds, and more.

• Do you have a library of old corporate videos and need a way to repurpose them?
• Are you creating product demo's using screen capture tools and looking for a better way to add your voice and distribute them?

Why not use Brainshark to host your video files? You can easily add video to an existing Brainshark presentation, or just upload a video file to create a new Brainshark. It's as simple as choosing the new 'Upload Video' link under the Things You Can Do menu.

   

With our February release, we announced support for FLV videos in addition to our existing support for SWF videos. What does this mean? If you upload videos in these formats we can play them right in the Brainshark player. That means your viewers can easily pause or play the video, and advance and rewind to points in the file.  

You may also continue to upload alternative video types. These however will attempt to play using a video player on the viewer's computer. We are actively working to enhance our video support so that we can accept any common format and play it in our flash player. More to come!

For more information, check out our best practices for using video.

Kristin

p.s.  In case you didn't hear, we increased our file upload limit to 100MB in our March release.  So what are you waiting for?  Let's get those videos "Brainsharked" today!

 

     If your company has purchased the Brainshark Marketing Campaigns module, then this certification program will prepare you as a Campaign Manager. Once you have completed the certification curriculum, you will be prepared for creating, managing and distributing custom campaigns through Brainshark.You will be well versed in users, groups, reports and administration.  And finally, you will be educated on the best practices that we have put together for the Marketing Campaigns module.   To access the certification program for Marketing Campaigns, just click on the image below.

Once you have submitted your scores we will send you your certificate and a gift from Brainshark.

     If your company has purchased the Brainshark Rapid Learning module, then this certification program will prepare you as a Rapid Learning Administrator. Once you have completed the curriculum, you will be prepared for managing students, courses and curricula.  You will be well versed in groups, reports and administration.  And finally you will be educated on the best practices that we have put together for the Rapid Learning module.   To access the certification program for Rapid Learning, just click on the image below.

Once you have submitted your scores we will send you your certificate and a gift from Brainshark.

Software as a Service, or SaaS, continues to demonstrate its advantages. I came across this article which highlights some of the advantages of utilizing on-demand applications as a green alternative. When you combine the potential energy savings of leveraging SaaS with the idea of creating a collaborative environment for remote employees, the case gets even stronger for any business.

Going green means seeing green with SaaS