Education
Sophia Martinez
Director of EducationNational Society for Behavioral Health Leaders
Sophia scrapped a flagship certificate program that everyone was proud of and almost nobody finished — then rebuilt learning around the fifteen minutes members actually have.
Providence, Rhode Island
Why we love this
Why We Love What Sophia Is Doing
The Society’s leadership certificate was, by every internal measure, a success. It had been running for six years. It had a waiting list. It was mentioned by name in the strategic plan.
It also had a completion rate of 31%. Sophia Martinez was the first person to say out loud that a program two-thirds of enrollees abandon is not a program with an engagement problem. It is a program that does not fit the lives of the people it was built for.
What she did next required more courage than most education redesigns: she went and asked the people who quit.
The Challenge
The certificate asked for eight modules over twelve weeks, each running ninety minutes, delivered live on Thursday afternoons.
Sophia pulled the list of everyone who had enrolled in the previous three cohorts and stopped attending after module two or three. There were 187 of them. She emailed all 187 personally, with a subject line that read: I would like to know what got in the way.
Sixty-one people wrote back. Several apologized. "That was the part that got me," Sophia says. "They were apologizing to us for having jobs."
“A clinical supervisor cannot block ninety minutes on a Thursday. If your program requires that, you have quietly decided who it is for.”
Listening to Members
Sophia ran fourteen small-group conversations with early-career supervisors — people two to five years into managing a team for the first time. She asked one question repeatedly: tell me about the last time you did not know what to do at work.
The answers were remarkably consistent, and none of them matched the curriculum. Members did not need a survey of leadership theory. They needed to know what to say on Monday to a staff member who had made a serious documentation error. They needed to know how to run a supervision session when they themselves were burnt out.
Her team turned those conversations into a list of twenty-three moments. Not topics — moments. Each one written as a sentence a member might actually say to themselves at their desk.
A few of the twenty-three
- "Someone on my team is struggling and I do not know whether to escalate."
- "I have to give feedback to a person who trained me."
- "Our documentation audit is in nine days and I am not ready."
- "I am covering two roles and something has to give."
What They Changed
The twelve-week certificate became a library of short, self-contained pieces — most between nine and eighteen minutes — each built for one of the twenty-three moments. A member can start at moment nineteen and never touch moment one.
Each piece ends the same way: a single thing to try this week, and the name of a member who has done it. Sophia insisted on that last part. "Learning that ends with a quiz teaches you that you finished. Learning that ends with a person teaches you that you are not alone."
- Completion rate
- 31% → 84%
- Median session length
- 14 min
- Sessions completed in year one
- 2,180
- Member moments the library is built around
- 23
The certificate still exists, for members who want the credential. It is now assembled from the library rather than the other way round — complete any twelve of the twenty-three and it is yours.
What Happened Next
Completion moved from 31% to 84%. More telling: the average member now touches learning content nine times a year instead of once, and 38% of those sessions happen between 7pm and 10pm.
Sophia keeps one message printed on her wall, from a supervisor in Tulsa who wrote in after using a fourteen-minute piece on the morning of a difficult conversation.
“I watched it in my car in the parking lot before I went in. It was exactly the right fourteen minutes.”
What Other Associations Can Learn
- Email the people who dropped out. They will tell you the truth, and many of them will be grateful you asked.
- Build around moments, not topics. Members do not experience their jobs as a curriculum.
- A low completion rate is a design verdict, not a member failing.
- End learning with a person to talk to, not a certificate. The credential is the packaging; the connection is the benefit.
Our members don’t need more content. They need the right help at the right moment.
The Member Impact
What changed for members
Learning at the Society now meets members inside their working day rather than asking them to leave it — and the program’s success is measured by whether members finish, not whether they enroll.
- Program completion
- 31% → 84%
- Annual learning sessions per memberUp from roughly once a year
- 9×
- Of sessions happen after 7pm
- 38%
Beyond the numbers
- Content is organized by the twenty-three moments members get stuck, not by subject area.
- Every session ends with one action and one member’s name.
- The certificate is now assembled from short pieces rather than gating them.
- Members who abandoned the old program have returned; a third of them have since finished.
“For the first time an association built something that assumed I have a caseload. That sounds small. It is not.”
In their words
Hear It From Sophia
Sophia Martinez on rebuilding education around fifteen-minute realities
7 min
Sophia describes emailing 187 members who quit her flagship program, and what their answers taught her about how learning actually fits into a working week.
Add a YouTube or Vimeo embed URL to this profile’s video.url field to replace this placeholder.
Meet More People Who Love Their Members
See every story
Maya Thompson
Vice President of Member ExperienceNational Association of Community Health Professionals
Maya rebuilt her association’s first ninety days after she personally interviewed dozens of new members — and discovered almost…
Read Their Story
Daniel Kim
Director of Digital StrategyAssociation of Independent Engineering Professionals
Daniel rebuilt his association’s digital experience around a single measurement almost nobody tracks: how long it takes a…
Read Their Story
Marcus Bennett
Director of MembershipAmerican Outdoor Industry Professionals Association
Marcus put eight members and four staff in the same room every month, wrote down everything, and built the discipline that…
Read Their Story
Nominate someone
Know Someone Who Loves Their Members?
The association community is full of people doing thoughtful, creative, and meaningful work for their members.
Help us find them.
It takes about five minutes. You can nominate a colleague, a peer at another organization, or your whole team.