The Challenge
Visit Detroit recognized a major opportunity to unify and elevate the city's visitor experience by equipping front-line workers, volunteers, and community members with consistent, engaging training. While the city’s tourism offerings had expanded and its brand evolved, there was no streamlined way to share that story across all touchpoints. The team sought a scalable, accessible solution that could foster community pride, correct outdated perceptions, and empower more people to confidently represent Detroit to visitors.
The Solution
The Decision to Partner with Learn Tourism
Visit Detroit began exploring training solutions as part of a broader strategic push to align its new brand narrative with the everyday visitor experience. The team, led by Angela J., was especially interested in creating a learning platform that could be accessed on-demand, customized to reflect Detroit’s identity, and scalable across industries. Early in the process, they considered traditional in-person training and other certification providers but ultimately found those options to be too limited, expensive, or slow to update.
Learn Tourism’s platform stood out because of its custom branding capabilities, multilingual accessibility, real-time course editing, and the ability to deploy training quickly to hundreds of users, all while maintaining Detroit’s distinctive voice and goals.
“I want to share with others my love for the city and all it has to offer—arts, culture, music, history.”
The Results
From Vision to Implementation
Through a series of collaborative workshops and content co-creation sessions, Visit Detroit’s team helped shape the “Detroit Champions” curriculum. The program included:
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A custom domain and branded course portal
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Three Detroit-specific learning modules
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Welcome and closing surveys to gather feedback
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Custom digital certificates using Detroit’s fonts, logos, and colors
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Admin tools for tracking progress, managing learners, and updating content in real time
By involving internal staff in a soft launch and reviewing learner feedback, Visit Detroit ensured the course was both educational and inspiring.
“I recently moved to Detroit and want to become more knowledgeable and a better communicator and advocate for my community.”
Participants appreciated that the course was visually appealing, easy to navigate, and packed with useful insights. The ability to embed multimedia, customize content, and receive direct feedback from learners gave Visit Detroit both control and confidence as the program grew.
“The ease to gain a better understanding of Detroit in one hour.”
With strong initial adoption, high satisfaction, and a clear pathway for community expansion, the Detroit Champions program is already becoming a blueprint for locally rooted, globally relevant tourism training.
