Introducing StrongMind
⭐️ StrongMind builds award-winning digital curriculum for tens of thousands of K–12 students. In 2025, they realized the company documenting learning for everyone else hadn't documented itself. Here's what happened next — and why it earned them Trainual's Account of the Year.
StrongMind has spent more than two decades building online learning that works. The Chandler, Arizona edtech company started as the exclusive technology and curriculum partner for what would become Primavera Online, Arizona's largest online school, and has since picked up five Regional Emmy Awards, an EdTech Cool Tool Award, and recognition as a Top 25 Global Impact-Certified EdTech Company.
So it's a little ironic where their Trainual story starts.
"In 2025, we noticed a gap in our documentation process that led to confusion among our teams," says Stephenie Grover, People Success Business Partner at StrongMind. "Processes were lost. Communication stalled. And our people weren't being supported."
A company whose entire product is structured, engaging learning had its own internal knowledge scattered across documents, tools, and people's heads.
"We launched Trainual internally with the intention of closing these gaps," Stephenie says. "Not only has it satisfied our process and brought clarity — it's also allowed us to revamp our onboarding process and create micro trainings that support the growth of our team. At an edtech company like StrongMind, we believe in continuous growth and training, and Trainual has given us this platform to do that."
The rollout: power users first
StrongMind didn't roll Trainual out slowly. They went from 21 seats to roughly 470 in a single year — one of the fastest expansions in Trainual's customer base, and a big part of why the team took home Account of the Year at Playbook 2026.
Noelle Creamer, StrongMind's Chief People Officer, credits two things: the product and the ramp.
"It's very intuitive," she says. "And the support that we get from Trainual University — just meeting with our CSM — we knew we were all in."
The rollout strategy was deliberate. Rather than pushing 470 people into a new tool and hoping, the people success team went first.
"Trainual University got us up to speed," Noelle says. "We made sure that our success team, our HR team — that they understood how to use Trainual, and that they became power users. So that they could then support all of our team members migrating onto Trainual: how to use it, how to set up their own departments, all of that."
That same logic is why StrongMind brought eight people to Playbook 2026 — more than any other team at the conference.
"It's just making sure that our teams are power users in Trainual, so they can support more broadly across the organization," Noelle says. "We have a very large organization. We're maximizing really our ROI with Trainual, which we already have — but just taking advantage of all the new learnings."
Rebuilding onboarding from "turned loose" to training paths
Ask Stephenie what changed most, and she goes straight to onboarding.
"Before, it was basically HR met with people, and there was just a couple of hours," Stephenie says. "They did a tour, and then they were turned loose."
Now it's a process instead of a day.
"There's check-ins," Stephenie says. "Employees are allowed to not only see the HR processes, but the processes that are dedicated to their specific position as well. And we have training paths for them. It's just amazing."
Training paths are Stephenie's favorite feature, and the vehicle for the micro trainings her team has built out. Each new hire gets a path shaped to their role rather than a firehose of company-wide material.
StrongMind measures whether it's landing. New hire onboarding surveys go out through Rippling — one of what the team calls their "Five to Thrive" core platforms — on the Tuesday after a start date, roughly eight days in.
"We're consistently getting excellent feedback on their experience with the information that they've been provided," Stephenie says. "So we feel like we're on a really good path."
She didn't need a survey to know the old version wasn't working, though. She'd lived it.
"I'll use myself as an example: I didn't get a great onboarding experience," Stephenie says. "So whenever somebody has joined HR since I've been there, it's been my goal to help them and have them know everything that I know."
The Slack rabbit hole, solved
StrongMind's team runs about 300 AI searches in Trainual a month, with more than 1,500 hours saved.
Noelle has a specific reason she cares about that number, and it isn't efficiency.
"Most new employees are afraid to ask questions within their first week," Noelle says, "because they feel like this company took a chance on me — they want to make sure that I do a good job and that I understand what I'm here to do. So they're more shy to ask those questions."
"If they can go into Trainual and use the AI search, or find a process, that's going to get them up to speed," she continues. "It's going to increase their confidence. And they're going to be able to soar."
She's seen the alternative at other companies.
"When you have to go hunting for processes, and you have to go down the Slack rabbit hole to look for information..." Noelle says. "People are supported when things are clear, when they know expectations, when the accountability is there, and when people can find what they need in the moment."
One of the biggest unlocks was almost embarrassingly simple. "We made our employee handbook completely searchable," Noelle says, "which has been such a game changer for our employees to be able to go in and find the information that they need."
AI shows up on the authoring side too. "AI is a big, big cornerstone of our company. We are one million percent on board with AI," Stephenie says. "I myself, in creating content with Trainual, have used AI to create the content — because sometimes you just get stuck and don't know what to say. And it just... boom. It's amazing."
Making the boring things less boring
If Stephenie built the foundation, Alli built the personality.
As StrongMind's People Experience Designer, her job description is roughly: "I kind of try to make our processes and policies look not boring."
Her toolkit is the one Trainual ships with — she just uses all of it. Subjects and documents to break long policies into readable chunks. Tests and short assessments at the end. Embedded Looms. And GIFs, lots of them.
"I like to add a lot of GIFs," Alli says. "I think that makes things really fun, especially with things like our team member handbook. Adding some GIFs kind of helps break it up a little bit — makes it not as stale."
She has a rule about PDFs, too: avoid them when you can.
"What I typically like to do, if I can, is copy and paste a policy that's sent to me into Trainual instead of uploading it as a PDF," she says. "It's a little more easy to navigate if you can just see it right there."
Anyone at StrongMind can build in Trainual, and they're encouraged to. But when the people success team needs something built well, it goes to Alli — who also keeps the fonts and formatting consistent across the whole organization so it all feels like one company.
Her advice for teams whose Trainual is technically complete but not exactly loved:
"I still see people kind of just copying and pasting and leaving it at that," Alli says. "That's a great start — you've got to start somewhere. But our attention spans nowadays are very limited, and I think that's a really big plus of using Trainual: you can break up those really big things into smaller bite-sized pieces. So it's a lot easier to digest."
"Use the features Trainual offers you," she says. "The tests, the subjects, the documents, the videos. Use the Looms, embed those. That will really help any organization."
The permission to do it that way is the part she doesn't take for granted.
"I feel really genuinely lucky to work for an organization that allows me to make things fun," Alli says. "There are a lot of companies where — I don't know a good way to say this without being mean — things are just more boring. It's nice that I can add a little flare and not be scared that it's going to be like, oh, that was too unprofessional. We're all people. We all have personalities and interests. All of that combined makes anything that we put in Trainual just a little bit more engaging."
Her own onboarding, she says, was easier than expected: "It honestly was not hard at all. With Trainual University it made it pretty simple. At first it might have been a little bit overwhelming, just because everything is so new — I was at a new job. But those videos really made it easy to understand, and helped ease my mind, because your voice with Trainual is similar to ours. It's fun. Let's make this exciting. Let's make this engaging."
Fun isn't a nice-to-have
There's a pattern in how the StrongMind team talks about Trainual, and it's not the pattern most software gets.
"They love Trainual," Noelle says. "And not only from a user standpoint of getting in and using it — our content creators love it as well, because we could really bring our processes to life, our training to life, the content to life."
"It doesn't feel like this daunting, painful thing that's just another check-the-box type of activity," Noelle says. "It's something that people really want to get into."
That shows up in the data she watches. "It's really evident in the reporting and the analytics that we get — to see that people are using AI to search for what they're looking for, that people are diving into our micro trainings and experiencing growth and learning new things. Because it's fun."
Going remote-first with documentation as the backbone
StrongMind is now a remote-first organization — a shift that turn internal documentation from a convenience into infrastructure.
“We launched a very comprehensive remote work training,” Noelle says. “We got great feedback on that training as well.”
Managers and leadership have built their own department-level onboarding on top of the company baseline. "It's really helped just get team members up to speed," Noelle says, "making sure they're continuing to grow with us and stay with us. When things are clear and information is provided, people stick around — because they love the work and they love what they're doing."
Alli’s most anticipated feature from the new suite previewed at Playbook is, fittingly, a cultural one: team bios.
"From a culture perspective, the thing I was most excited about, if I'm being completely honest, is the bios," Alli says. "That makes me really excited, especially as we move to a fully remote organization. We're trying to find any and all ways to keep our organization connected. Adding things like our interests, or extra pictures, really adds a human touch — getting a little insight into the people who are working on the other side of the screen."
Why any of this matters to a kid in Arizona
StrongMind's mission is students and families. Trainual is an internal tool. Noelle draws the line between them without hesitation.
"It's really important that our people are supported," Noelle says. "We're moving fast. We have a lot to accomplish."
"We're here to empower our learners and students with innovative tools and world-class curriculum," she says. "That's really what drives us forward — and making sure that the people behind the mission are fully supported in every capacity. That has to translate to student success and our families being taken care of."
Stephenie puts it more plainly: "I think the student experience at the school is better because we're providing our employees — our teachers — with better information."
"I would panic first"
Asked what would happen if StrongMind's Trainual account vanished tomorrow, Noelle didn't reach for a metric.
"I would panic first," Noelle says. "I would be very sad. That would mean not only processes were lost, but trainings, our data, the reporting, the analytics, being able to connect people to different departments — all of that visibility would go away. And that would be not a good thing."
"It is definitely one of our core platforms that runs our entire organization," she says, "and we plan to be with Trainual for a very long time."
For anyone in her seat who's still weighing it, she says: "Definitely go all in. Set up a demo, walk through how Trainual works, walk through the benefits. We've experienced tremendous value from it, and we tell everybody how much we love Trainual."
Stephenie's version is shorter.
"Just do it," Stephenie says. "There's nothing more effective for retaining your employees than giving them the information they need. It is so frustrating to be an employee and not know what to do. Trainual provides that platform. And it just makes it easy."
TL;DR
- The gap: In 2025, an edtech company building structured learning for tens of thousands of students found its own processes scattered across tools, inboxes, and people's heads.
- The rollout: 21 Trainual seats to roughly 470 in a single year — HR and people success trained as power users first, then turned loose to support everyone else.
- Onboarding rebuilt: A couple of hours with HR and a tour became role-specific training paths, micro trainings, and scheduled check-ins, measured by new hire surveys sent eight days in.
- The payoff: ~300 AI searches a month, a fully searchable employee handbook, and 1,500+ hours saved — plus the confidence for new hires to find answers without having to ask.
- The recognition: StrongMind brought eight people to Playbook 2026, more than any other team, and was named Trainual's Account of the Year.
👉 Want to see what a rollout like this looks like for your team? Get a demo of Trainual.
