Khan Academy, Changing Mindsets
- Year
- 2014, 2019
The world’s classroom
Sal Khan started the Khan Academy with the mission of bringing a free world class education to anyone, anywhere. While millions of learners had found their way to the site, the Khan team had never done any kind of marketing to let the rest of the world know about it. In 2014, we got talking with Sal and his team about creating their first ever marketing campaign. Could we double the number of learners on the platform??
Maybe it’s not about Khan Academy itself, but something bigger?
We spent a lot of time with the Khan Academy team, digging into their motivations: ‘what keeps you working so hard here, when you could be over the road at Google?’ ‘And what really holds learners back?’
We also spent a lot of time with teachers and students that had embraced the platform: ‘what has Khan Academy meant to you?’
A 12-year old girl, sitting in a classroom surrounded by her peers, said something remarkable to us: “the amazing thing about Khan Academy is not that I learned math, it’s that I learned that I can learn. I thought I was just not smart, but once I realized I could learn math, I realized I could learn other things too.” ✨✨
It turns out, this idea was also the animating excitement of the Khan Academy team, who had been inspired by Stanford Professor Carol Dweck’s work on the growth mindset.
You only have to know one thing:
you can learn anything.
The growth mindset, Tldr: if you believe you can learn, you will. If you don’t, you won’t. Neuroscience has proven our brain plasticity: the brain really is like a muscle.
Now, we weren’t just making marketing for Khan Academy, but, in Sal’s words: ‘a growth mindset intervention for the world’
Something remarkable happens
…when you champion something bigger than yourself. People want to help.
And people did help. We had an Oscar-winning film director help us make the launch film. LeBron James and his foundation got involved. John Legend made a film with Sal about his experience with the growth mindset.
You only have to know one thing,
You Can Learn Anything.
A simple idea that changes everything.
And then it became a movement
Called LearnStorm. Learners, classes, schools and school districts would compete: not to see who was smartest, but who could learn the most. This started in the Bay Area, and took off around the world.
Millions and millions of new learners
This ‘growth mindset intervention for the world’ changed a lot of people’s minds. It also led millions of people back to Khan Academy — more than doubling user numbers — and, proving that the growth mindset was sinking in, increasing the depth of usage from current users by 66% from the previous year.
