The Dimensions UK Story

Helping people with learning disabilities be active in their communities

Dimensions UK is a British not-for-profit, charitable organization and housing association that supports people with learning disabilities and complex needs. It was founded in 1976 and staffs over 7,000 people across the UK – many who lack tech-savvy skills with modern SaaS platforms.

The Challenge

Driving adoption and engagement of its new care management platform ‘iplanit’

Dimensions UK invested in a new care management system (iplanit) to enable a new digital model of supporting its people, called ‘Activate’.

Activate supports people with an evidence-based and outcome-focused mentality. ‘Activate’ increased meaningful people activity by 25% and lowered challenging behaviors by 60%. With Activate, Dimensions enabled the people they support to live as active citizens, playing impacting roles in their communities.

iplanit is the central technology system that faciliates Activate. iplanit enables Dimensions employees, as well as the people they support, to document peoples’ preferences (such as morning routine) and medications. This enables its care support team with the knowledge on how to provide the best support to those they care for, even new Dimensions employees or volunteers. This is critical for those with learning and social disabilities like Autism.

iplanit empowered Dimensions UK to ensure that the people they support lead engaged and fulfilling lives. The benefits of iplanit are heavily dependent on how diligently and accurately care and support workers enter data into it.

The initial iplanit onboarding and training wasn’t successful due to several limitations, such as low IT literacy within the organization and outdated training methods. Care workers failed to realize the benefits of iplanit and its complex workflows further hurt adoption – with less than 10% of Dimension UK care workers fully adopting the care management system.

The Solution

Learning by doing with Whatfix’s in-app guidance and real-time support

While Dimensions UK is considered a leader in using technology to improve people’s lives, poor user adoption negatively impacted its goals. The Dimensions L&D team started looking for creative and innovative ways to solve this technology adoption challenge and found Whatfix’s digital adoption platform.

The nonprofit’s IT team was initially attracted to Whatfix’s DAP solution for its ease of use and non-dependence on IT to create in-app training and support content and comprehensive digital guidance features that included nearly a dozen different types of in-app widgets and overlays that could be created.

The Dimension team supported its care workers to better use iplanit through in-app guidance and real-time support, providing these employees and volunteers with moment-of-need support in the flow of work. Dimensions achieved this through three main areas of support with Whatfix.

1. Microlearning with in-app guidance

With Whatfix, Dimensions UK was able to promote learning and doing at the same time through in-app guidance, such as interactive flows, product tours, pop-ups, tooltips, field validations, and more.

Interactive training helped overcome user resistance, as they felt more confident in using iplanit with guided walkthroughs that helped them complete activities in real-time.

As users started entering data with more discipline and data quality increased, iplanit became the treasure of information and helped achieve the outcomes Dimensions desired with its iplanit investment. The company started with activities such as daily record-creating, adding key tasks, viewing people preferences, and more – and L&D will soon use Whatfix to enable management tasks and to further extract ROI from other iplanit processes.

2. Real-time iplanit support with Self Help

Whenever care and support employees are stuck in Iplanit, they turn to Whatfix Self Help for answers.

Self Help provides employees with actionable and contextual information relevant to the page they are on in iplanit, as well as their individual role. Self Help aggregates all of Dimensions’ knowledge, information, and documentation from various sources across the company to provide personalized help to support workers, establishing trust. Dimensions UK uses Whatfix as a resource for its IT help to use walkthroughs to solve support issues.

3. Multi-format training content

With a system that’s upgraded and updated every three months, keeping training updated can take weeks each quarter. However, with Whatfix, the L&D department was able to develop content during the software beta testing phase pre-launch, thereby making sure that the most recent and accurate training is available as the updates are pushed live to employees, ie. iplanit end-users.

Whatfix multi-formatted training content is auto-updated every time a corresponding walkthrough is modified. Multi-format content can be displayed as videos, slideshows, or PDFs, which enables care workers to learn in their preferred medium.

“My experience in working with Whatfix has been excellent. I’ve found their account and customer success team to be very helpful and clear. They’ve taken the time to understand our needs and goals and have helped us on that journey. They’ve also had a great focus on coaching and empowering my team, at a pace that meets our needs, to work with Whatfix,” said Willis-Baxter.

Dimensions UK is currently evaluating Whatfix to drive the adoption of its internally designed system dealing with all of its time management, payroll, and other core HR functions.

“Our main ‘aha’ moment came from a colleague at our sister company who said, ‘Can we use Whatfix’s digital guidance on our time management app too?’ It showed us the value Whatfix adds and how straightforward it is to use for employees.”