Learning professionals are often asked to solve a familiar problem: drive engagement with content that is clearly relevant to employees’ roles but not tied to an immediate task or deadline.

In these cases, traditional delivery methods tend to underperform. Self-directed courses rely on discretionary motivation. One-time workshops create a moment of exposure that erodes quickly without sustained reinforcement. Knowledge bases are most useful to employees who already know what to look for.

This case study examines the Level Up: Partners Season Pass campaign run by Workleap, a distributed B2B SaaS company, and outlines how a campaign-style learning experience combined multi-channel delivery, gamification and spaced application to increase engagement with this type of low urgency content for a distributed, cross-functional audience.

Case Study: Level Up Campaign

At Workleap, internal enablement content on the company’s partner ecosystem had been consolidated into a well-designed knowledge hub. Despite its quality, engagement remained low: 24 employees accessed the content over its lifetime, out of a population of more than 300.

To address this, the team designed Level Up: Partner Season Pass, an eight-week internal learning campaign.

The campaign structure included:

• A baseline assessment
• Weekly microlessons delivered through the learning management system (LMS)
• Slack-based reflection prompts and discussion threads
• Optional applied “bonus challenges”
• A final capstone activity

Learners earned experience points (XP) across activities, with recognition and prizes tied to different types of participation.

Here’s what we learned along the way.

Designing for Engagement When Urgency Is Low

Learning campaigns borrow their cadence from marketing: repeated, spaced exposure designed to influence behavior over time. However, cadence alone is not sufficient. In practice during the Level Up campaign, three design choices proved critical.

1. Meet learners in the flow of work

In most organizations, especially remote, hybrid and otherwise distributed ones, employees spend a significant portion of their day in collaboration tools such as Slack or Teams. Positioning these tools as the “front door” for a learning campaign reduces friction — learners don’t need to remember to visit a separate platform.

In the Level Up campaign, the chat layer didn’t replace structured learning. Instead, it acted as a trigger point: surfacing weekly prompts, reinforcing participation through social visibility and creating opportunities for reflection and discussion.

2. Create reasons to engage with deeper content

When content isn’t urgent, motivation needs to be designed deliberately. In the Level Up campaign, a gamified structure provided that motivation. Weekly prompts framed each activity as a “mission,” with a low time commitment and clear reward (points, recognition and leaderboard movement).

Structured learning remained in the LMS, while reference materials lived in a knowledge base. The campaign connected these elements, rather than expecting any one tool to fulfill all roles.

3. Extend learning through application and peer interaction

Spaced repetition consistently outperforms massed practice for retention. However, retention alone isn’t the goal; application is.

During the Level Up campaign, each week incorporated reflection prompts and applied challenges designed to make thinking visible. Learners weren’t only asked to consume content, but also to interpret and apply it in a public channel. This created the opportunities for peer learning that would be difficult to replicate in a single-session format.

The Role of Thematic Design

The Level Up campaign was structured around a video game “season pass” theme. While gamification is often discussed in terms of points or rewards, the thematic layer played a more significant role in our example. The human brain is wired to learn through stories. A compelling narrative “provides special access to increase someone’s engagement and retention.” In this case, the theme created continuity across multiple weeks and modalities.

Concepts were embedded within the narrative:

• Partner personas became “companions.”
• Internal resources became part of a “codex.”
• Weekly activities were framed as missions.

This consistency reduced cognitive load and provided retrieval cues, while also lowering the activation energy required to engage with optional content.

Where the Learning Actually Happened

While the microlessons provided foundational knowledge, the most meaningful learning during the campaign happened in two areas: peer discussion and applied challenges.

1. Cross-Functional Discussion

Weekly reflection prompts generated visible, role-specific reasoning.

For example, after a lesson on partner personas, learners were asked to identify which persona they would prioritize when building a partner strategy. Responses varied significantly by function. Marketing-focused employees prioritized reach and demand generation, while technical roles emphasized implementation depth.

These differences surfaced tacit knowledge and enabled learners to compare perspectives across functions — a form of social learning that can be difficult to achieve in more structured programs.

2. Applied Challenges

Optional “bonus challenges” functioned as opportunities to test application.

In one activity, learners designed a “character card” for a partner persona, defining its role and strategic value. In another, they proposed new features for the company’s newly launched partner portal.

Submissions demonstrated not only recall, but synthesis. For example, one learner proposed an AI-assisted deal registration process, identifying friction in the current workflow and suggesting specific data inputs to improve efficiency. Another designed a tool to prevent under-licensing, linking it to downstream support challenges.

These responses indicated that learners understood both the content and its operational context — a key indicator of transfer.

Outcomes

By the end of the campaign:

• 120 employees engaged with at least one activity (a fivefold increase from the six who had engaged with the pre-existing knowledge hub before the campaign)
• Average assessment scores improved from 8.25 to 9.40
• Course ratings ranged from 4.8 to 5.0 stars
• A subset of participants completed all available activities across all eight weeks

More importantly, the content began to appear in day-to-day work conversations, suggesting a shift from awareness to application.

Lessons Learned

Several design considerations emerged that we’ll apply next time:

• Duration matters. Eight weeks was ambitious for non-mandatory content. A four-to-six-week arc might have compressed the engagement curve without sacrificing the depth available to fully engaged learners. We’ll test this next time.
• Application drives value. The two bonus challenges were actually the campaign’s strongest application points. Next time, we’ll treat creative and applied challenges as core design work, not optional add-ons, and put more design effort into these.

• Design for cross-functional learning. The most valuable Slack threads we saw in this campaign (e.g., a persona-recruitment debate in Week 4 and a segmentation discussion in Week 3) produced organic, cross-functional peer learning. Next campaign, we’ll design reflection prompts more intentionally to deliberately draw out functional differences, whereas this time those differences emerged only incidentally and we hadn’t planned for them.

• Plan for continued engagement. A meaningful subset of learners asked for more after the campaign ended. Next time we plan to add optional additional learning for those who want to go deeper.

Conclusion

A learning campaign isn’t just a series of communications layered onto existing content. It’s a connected experience: meet learners in the channels they already use, give them concrete reasons to engage with structured content and extend application and peer dialogue across time.

For content that employees need but are unlikely to prioritize on their own, this approach offers a practical alternative to traditional delivery models.