Special thanks to Shannon Howard and Intellum for the opportunity to share these ideas.

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In today’s uber connected world, learning is no longer a rigidly academic top-down motion.

With the rise of social media and online communities, we’re seeing a fascinating shift in how people learn and share knowledge, especially in the SaaS communities.

Let’s explore how companies can harness the power of social learning to create value for their customers, champions, and brands.

What is “social learning” really?

Back in the 1960s, psychologist Albert Bandura discovered something fascinating through his experiments with bozo dolls: humans naturally learn by observing and imitating others, especially people they view as credible or successful.

Fast forward to 2025, and this behavior plays out in fascinating ways across SaaS communities:

• A new admin watches a YouTube tutorial from a respected power user
• A customer implements a workflow after seeing it shared in a forum
• A team adopts best practices they learned at a community meetup

But here’s the key thing about social learning in the SaaS world: it’s not about rigid, top-down academic training programs.

Those are important too – they provide that branded perspective that customers need. But social learning is different. It grows organically from your biggest fans, happening naturally in forums, on YouTube, on Reddit, where multiple perspectives on how to do something flourish.

Think about it this way: your official training content is one-to-many (one branded perspective reaching many learners). Social learning is many-to-many, creating space for diverse perspectives and use cases to emerge naturally within your community.

Why Does Social Learning Matter?

The beauty of social learning is that it drives triple value for everyone involved:

1. Customers get high-value learning experiences from trusted experts
2. Champions (who create the content) gain professional credibility and expand their networks
3. Products & brands flourish with peer learning and champion-led growth

Let’s talk numbers for a moment. At Atlassian, we found that 44% of participants reported increasing their product usage after attending community-led training sessions. Industry research suggests that 38% of companies increase adoption of products targeted by training. And when it comes to peer-to-peer forums, companies see around 28% fewer support tickets after implementation.

But perhaps the most interesting metric? About 5% of community-led training participants reported purchasing a new product license after attending sessions. This suggests social learning isn’t just about post-sales product adoption – it could be a powerful driver for cross-sell and upsell opportunities too.

Real-World Example: Community-Led Classes

One of the most successful social learning experiments at Atlassian has been our Community-Led Classes program. The idea emerged from a simple observation: Atlassian experts were already creating high-quality training content through YouTube livestreams, aiming to build their audiences and grow their consulting practices.

Instead of trying to control or replace this organic behavior, Atlassian asked: “How can we help these champions reach their goals while connecting our customers to great content?” The answer was to create a marketing engine that helped promote these existing livestreams to Atlassian’s customer base.

The results? Community-led classes became one of the most popular chapters in Atlassian’s community events space, with over 6,000 chapter members and a 2X increase in event attendees compared to other programs. The secret to its success? It’s a win-win-win system that:

• Helps champions build their audiences and businesses
• Connects customers to authentic, expert-led learning experiences
• Scales education without requiring significant resource investment from Atlassian

One particularly innovative example is “Are You Smarter Than a Jira Admin?” – a gameshow-style learning experience created by community member Sajit Nair.

Using Mentimeter for interactive polling, participants answer questions about Jira administration while competing on a virtual leaderboard. It’s the kind of creative, engaging format that often emerges naturally from community innovation.

Other Social Learning Experiments

Not every experiment will succeed, and that’s okay. Here are some other initiatives Atlassian has tested:

Successful Programs:

• Creators Program: Over 100 Atlassian creators sharing free on-demand training content on social media
• Gamified Forum Leaderboard: Point system and badges to motivate forum participation
• Bite-sized Learning Challenges: Short video content with built-in quizzes and community discussion

Programs Under Reassessment:

• Certification Accelerator Experience: A cohort-based certification preparation program that proved too manually intensive to scale
• Community-integrated Classes: Embedding community forum questions within on-demand courses to create more social experiences

A Framework for Experimentation

If you’re interested in exploring social learning for your organization, here’s a simple experimental framework to follow:

1. Observe: Look for organic learning behaviors already happening in your community. Where are your most engaged users hanging out? What are they naturally doing?

2. Hypothesize: Define clear goals tied to what matters most to your team, business, and customers. For example: “If we drive customers to champion-led YouTube livestream trainings, we can train 6,000 customers each quarter without building any new content.”

3. Design a Pilot: Keep it simple and lightweight. Use existing tools and resources. Remove friction to make participation easy for champions and customers.

4. Iterate: Focus on gathering actionable data to validate your hypothesis. Combine quantitative metrics (attendance, engagement) with qualitative feedback.

5. Scale or sunset: Not every experiment needs to succeed. Use your results to guide whether you should sunset the initiative, refine it, or scale it up.

Key Takeaways for Getting Started

As you begin exploring social learning in your organization, remember these principles:

1. Notice, Support, Amplify: Your job isn’t to create social learning from scratch – it’s to notice where it’s already happening and figure out how to support and amplify it.

2. Start Small: Don’t try to build the perfect program right away. Run small experiments to validate your ideas and gather data.

3. Focus on Sustainable Systems: Look for ways to create self-sustaining systems that align incentives for all parties involved, rather than programs that require constant manual intervention.

4. Embrace Authenticity: Don’t try to over-control the content your champions create. The value often comes from their unique, genuine perspectives that complement your official training.

Remember, social learning isn’t about replacing your formal training programs – it’s about recognizing and amplifying the organic knowledge sharing that happens naturally in healthy communities. By creating systems that support these behaviors while aligning incentives for all parties involved, you can scale your educational impact while building stronger relationships with your champions and customers.

The key is to start small, experiment thoughtfully, and always keep focus on creating value for everyone in the ecosystem. After all, the best social learning programs don’t feel like programs at all – they feel like natural extensions of the community itself.