Case Study: ARLLS youth leadership startup
Company: Beacon Changemakers
Project: ARLLS Product Launch
Role: Product Manager
Launching up a youth leadership programme
Beacon Changemakers has been helping talented young East Africans into places at top African International Schools and UK Universities for over 15 years. More than just a scholarship programme, the Beacon team delivers a leadership programme to their scholars, in the hope that they will eventually lead ethical and positive change in African business and political institutions.
The extra-curricular leadership programme is called ARLLS, short for All Round Leadership Learning System. The collaborative learning programme has a curriculum comprising 20 modules on various aspects of essential and advanced leadership topics, all contextualised to the needs of young people from student age to early career professionals.
ARLLS has been so successful in building the leadership skills of these young Africans that the Beacon team decided to spin it out as a product in its own right in order to widen participation for young people anywhere. It is also intended as a future Beacon revenue stream. As a social enterprise, profits from ARLLS go back to the Beacon charity to fund more future African changemakers.
Getting stuck into startup life
My role in all of this is to help launch ARLLS to the wider world. As with getting any new service off the ground, the main focus has been on product definition, sales and marketing activity, and setting up operational processes and technical systems for growth. I’m about 2 years into this part-time contract and a typical week is spent on a mix of: outreach and lead management; nurturing partner relationships; running marketing campaigns; overseeing production systems including Bigin CRM, WordPress CMS and Moodle LMS; working with the curriculum team on product development and delivery; and supporting the wider Beacon charity on technology strategy. No day or week is ever the same, which makes it fun and ever-changing.
An early highlight was spending 2 weeks going around East African Beacon feeder schools, meeting scholars, staff and school leaders in a whirlwind of sales pitches and market / user research. We also visited some non-Beacon schools in the region, such as the amazing Freedom International School in rural Kenya, setup by one of the Beacon mentor network Dr Utheri Kanayo and her partner Eng. Oku Kanayo, and also Pestalozzi Academy in Lusaka, Zambia who do excellent work not just with local Lusaka students but have a boarding village for underprivileged rural students who receive full scholarships to their school. More on this later.
It’s all been immensely rewarding to work on. Having been through multiple new learning product and service launches at the likes of Epic/LEO, Kineo and Brightwave, it’s always a buzz to take an idea and see it grow, gain traction, and chase those first customers. Whereas my previous companies had established sales and marketing teams to call on, at ARLLS we are starting from scratch with a very small team, all mucking in. It’s incredibly tough work launching a product in the current market conditions, but the monthly Silicon Brighton leaders meetings that I attend have helped me understand that it’s not just us finding conditions difficult, everyone is having a really tough time of it across all sectors and all types of organisations from startups to large enterprises.
Hard won highlights
Despite the difficult market, there have been some real highlights over the past year that are well worth calling out and that our small but talented team can be rightly proud of!
Delivering a joint offering with the Programme for African Leadership at London School of Economics. The objective was to facilitate a pilot course catering to ambitious young Africans seeking guidance on international University admissions. By integrating an ARLLS module into a collaborative workshop developed with PfAL at LSE’s Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa (FLIA), we secured our initial paying clientele. Gaining validation from a world-renowned University provided significant momentum for our market entry. This “Emerging Leaders Masterclass” pilot achieved impressive metrics: a 100% completion rate, a 96% satisfaction rating for the workshop, and a 94% recommendation rate. While the partnership with PfAL and FLIA is in its nascent stages, we are currently participating in a subsequent pilot to further define our collaborative value proposition and are contributing to PfAL’s annual Futures Forum as an FLIA Partner.
Launching a 4-year initiative with Pestalozzi Zambia. The aforementioned Pestalozzi Academy is part of a larger group called Pestalozzi International. They run an international programme across Zambia, Nepal and India, called the Future Leaders Programme, identifying young potential leaders from disadvantaged rural communities and providing a fully sponsored education in their school network and a university pathway that has seen many successes over the years. Trying a new business model, we successfully secured a sum of money from a group of individual sponsors. This has funded a cohort of 21 students to take the full ARLLS curriculum over 4 years from grades 9 through 12. ARLLS adds a new dimension to their existing leadership programme and I can’t wait to see the results now that the programme is in full swing.
Proving the use of ARLLS for early career professionals with Dare for Progress, a Tanzanian NGO. A three-month, eight-module pilot at a high-pressure NGO confirmed ARLLS is as effective for early-career professionals as it is for students. Feedback showed that the programme transformed the team from a directive to a collaborative, adaptive culture. Key results included quarterly strategic reviews, a communication ethics framework, and enhanced emotional intelligence. This shift fostered a high-trust environment where the team now proactively leverages individual strengths and views challenges as growth opportunities. We are currently running a longitudinal survey to analyse impact one year on.
Working with Beacon to launch the High Fliers Academy, comprising ARLLS content with LSE and Imperial admissions workshops. It’s great to see ARLLS modules being used as part of the High Fliers Academy, helping to provide high quality pathways into UK Universities for students from under-represented backgrounds, who otherwise have to resort to Youtube and Tiktok for admissions advice. ARLLS modules on topics such as writing for personal impact (the perfect module for creating great applications) are being combined with workshops led by University Admissions teams and the Beacon Scholarship team. The modular structure of ARLLS lends itself really well to this model where it can be easily dropped in as part of a larger programme. This is just kicking off and interest looks very strong.
Process and product improvements
DOHE Edtech Accelerator: ARLLS was accepted into the DOHE Edtech Accelerator Programme, which provides free coaching to support our Go-To-Market strategy. The DOHE analysis rightly identified that ARLLS has a “strong programme and early traction”, and they were keen to support our startup journey. We’re about half way through this 6-month programme, the collaboration and output has been impressive so far and I look forward to seeing the results later this summer.
Technical product improvements: All ARLLS content is developed in Moodle to facilitate a genuinely collaborative and blended learning journey. By leveraging the Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) standard, ARLLS modules can remain hosted on our Moodle platform while being embedded directly into other institutional systems such as Blackboard, Canvas, or Moodle. This capability significantly bolsters our B2B value proposition. A successful integration test with the Open University of Kenya has already proven this workflow, which can now be replicated for any partner. Furthermore, based on learner feedback, we have implemented automatic activity completions, introduced branded certificates for module finishers and built an automated process using AI to classify and analyse nearly 2,000 student feedback items to identify themes and lessons.
Curriculum improvements: We have transitioned to a consistent, template-based system in Moodle alongside change logs and content creation manuals and training to simplify updates and ensure cross-module consistency. The curriculum team have done amazing work to put this all into practice, as well as standardising workshop preparation and operational procedures to ensure smoother workshop delivery. More on the full curriculum.
Automated enrolment systems: We need systems that will scale as we grow and we have been experimenting with technology solutions across a series of pilots. Early enrolment methods using Luma for course signups and payments. Over time this has grown more sophisticated and the most recent public course offering uses an embedded form on the website from our CRM system, so we automatically pull all registration data direct into the CRM where we want it. The learner is automatically moved into a Stripe payment workflow and we are then able to send confirmation and joining instruction emails to students and parents via the CRM system. It’s still evolving but is NEARLY a fully automated enrolment process. We currently host our Moodle on the basic MoodleCloud hosted offering but are moving to our own hosted Moodle site to enable improved customisation features, this will ensure we can complete the automation around the purchase and enrolment workflow, and go further into automated nudge communications as learners progress through their courses. With such a small team, we need to make the technology do the heavy lifting for us!
A bright future!
There is so much great work going on across the team that it’s a pleasure to be part of it. Our high volumes of learner feedback give us real confidence that we have a great product with a bright future ahead, and with all indicators showing the team making steady progress in a tricky market, it’s fair to say we are all really excited about the future!
If you work with young people whether in education or the workplace, and would like to take a look at the ARLLS leadership development product, please do drop me a line…