An animal shelter scaled up its volunteer base faster than its training capacity. New volunteers were getting a handbook and a shadowing shift that varied depending on who was working. The result: people with information on paper but no practiced confidence to apply it. Hesitation at kennel doors. Inconsistent behavioral logs. Close calls.
This project used the Forge Method to diagnose the real problem, define what the training needed to do, and design an interactive module that puts volunteers inside the decisions they'll face on their first shift.
Below is a walkthrough of how each stage shaped the final deliverable. At the bottom, you can click through the working module yourself.
The request came in as "onboarding training for new volunteers covering safe pet handling and body language." Standard stuff. The kind of request that usually gets handed straight to a content developer.
The Dig asked a different question first: is training the right tool here?
The answer turned out to be yes, but the problem wasn't what it looked like on the surface. Volunteers weren't missing information. They had the handbook. They'd read the materials. The gap was that reading about dog body language and actually reading a dog in front of you are two completely different skills. One is knowledge. The other is perception, judgment, and practiced confidence.
That diagnosis changed everything about what came next. A knowledge gap would have led to better reference materials. A process gap would have led to a new checklist. A skill gap means the training has to center practice and feedback, not information delivery.
Stage 2 defines the core learning experience before a single screen gets designed. The question isn't "what content do we cover?" It's "what does the learner need to encounter so they discover the skill gap themselves?"
The framing statement for this module: the learner needs to encounter their own uncertainty in the moment of reading an unfamiliar animal, so they discover that confident handling isn't about being fearless. It's about knowing what to look for and having something to do with what you see.
The delivery format is interactive eLearning, replacing the handbook as the primary onboarding experience. Given the skill gap type, the format works best on the perceptual side: teaching volunteers to read what they're seeing through realistic scenarios, decision points, and consequence-driven feedback. It can't fully replace supervised hands-on practice. So the design has to work hard to approximate real decision-making conditions rather than defaulting to content delivery.
Stage 3 builds the scenario architecture. Every element serves the framing statement from Stage 2. Nothing is decorative.
The module is structured around a single scenario: a new volunteer's first kennel interaction with an anxious dog named Biscuit. That scenario moves through a deliberate sequence designed to create the gap, fill it, and let the learner prove they can use what they've learned.
The opening and closing discovery questions bookend the experience. Before the scenario: "What does a confident animal handler look like?" After: "Has anything shifted?" The distance between those two answers is the learning made visible.
Measurement starts with the success metrics defined in Stage 1. Not satisfaction surveys. Not completion rates. Observable behavior change in the shelter.
The measurement plan is designed around what the shelter can actually observe with the staff they have. No elaborate assessment infrastructure. No LMS dashboards. Just: are the new volunteers doing the thing differently than before?
This is the working deliverable that came out of the process above. Interactive, browser-based, no software required. About 10 minutes.
Open the module →