Creating Your First Security Awareness Training Campaign

To protect your organization from security threats, it’s important that you enroll your users in security awareness training. Security awareness training informs your users about common security threats and provides them with tips on how to stay safe from these threats while at work.

For your first training campaign, we recommend that you enroll your users in a comprehensive module that covers common security topics such as social engineering, phishing, spear-phishing, spam, malware, and ransomware. We also recommend that you add notifications to your campaign to inform your employees about their training and remind them to take their training on time.

Click the links below to learn about our recommended training content for your first campaign, how to create your first campaign, and how to add notifications to your campaign. For more information about creating training campaigns, see our Creating and Managing Training Campaigns article.

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Recommended Training Content

Create Your First Campaign

Add Notifications to Your Campaign

Recommended Training Content

Before you create your first campaign, we recommend that you decide what training content you’d like to include. For your first campaign, we recommend that you enroll your users in a comprehensive training module that covers important security topics such as social engineering, phishing, malware, and ransomware. Our Kevin Mitnick Security Awareness Training module covers all of these topics and more.

We offer a 45-minute module and a 15-minute module of this training. While we recommend that you assign your users the 45-minute module, you can choose either module to best meet your organization's needs. Your users’ progress will be saved throughout the module, so they don’t have to complete the entire module all at once.

In addition to this training module, we offer a variety of other training content including videos, posters, games, and more. For information about all our available training content, see our ModStore and Library Guide. To learn more about your users’ Learner Experience, or LX, see our Learner Experience Guide.

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Create Your First Campaign

Once you’ve decided what training content you’d like to assign to your users, you can create your first training campaign. To create a training campaign in your KnowBe4 console, navigate to the Training tab. Then, click + Create Training Campaign.

On the Create New Training Campaign screen, you can fill out the fields based on your organization’s training needs. For detailed information about each of the available fields on this screen, see the Creating a Training Campaign section of our Creating and Managing Training Campaigns article. For an example of the settings that you could use for your first training campaign, see below.

1. Campaign Name: Enter a descriptive name for your campaign such as “Security Awareness Training”.
2. Start Date: Set the date, time, and time zone when you’d like the campaign to start.
3. End Date: Set the campaign end date. We recommend that you select Relative Duration and set a duration of 2 Weeks, 3 Weeks, or 4 Weeks. This will give your users enough time to take their training. In the screenshot above, the Relative Duration is set to 3 Weeks. We also recommended you select the Allow assignments to be completed after due date check box.
4. Content: Select Kevin Mitnick Security Awareness Training or a similar comprehensive training module. We recommend this training module because it addresses essential security topics that your users should learn early in their security awareness training. For more information about our recommended training modules, see the Recommended Training Content section above.
5. Enroll Groups: For your first campaign, we recommend that you select All Users to enroll all your employees in this campaign. This will ensure that all your users learn important security topics at the beginning of their security awareness training. However, if you’d prefer to only enroll specific groups, select Specific Groups and choose the groups you’d like to enroll.
6. Enable automatic enrolment for new users: Select this check box to automatically enroll new users in this campaign. We recommend that you select this check box so that any new employees added to your user list will be included in this training campaign.
7. + Add Notification: Click this button to add training notifications. You can add as many notifications as you’d like, but we recommend that you add a Welcome notification and Remind Before Due Date notification at a minimum. For instructions on how to add these notifications, see the Add Notifications to Your Campaign section below. For more information about notifications, see our Training Campaign Notifications article.

After you have customized these settings to your liking and added your notifications, click Create Campaign at the bottom of the page.

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Add Notifications to Your Campaign

When you create a training campaign, you have the ability to add notifications to remind your users to take their training. You can send as many notifications as you’d like.

At a minimum, we recommend that you send your users a Welcome notification and a Remind Before Due Date notification. These notifications will inform your users that they’ve been enrolled in training and remind them to take their training before the due date.

To add a Welcome notification to your campaign, fill out the fields below:

1. Notification Type: Select Welcome.
2. User: Select this check box to send the notification to your users.
3. Select Template: Click this drop-down menu and select the template that you’d like to use for this notification. We recommend that you select a template from the Welcome Notification (User) section of this drop-down menu.
4. Eye Icon: Click this icon to preview the notification.
5. Save: Click this button to save your notification settings.

To add a Remind Before Due Date notification to your campaign, click + Add Notification again and fill out the fields below:

1. Notification Type: Select Remind Before Due Date.
2. User: Select this check box to send the notification to your users.
3. Select Template: Click this drop-down menu and select the template that you’d like to use for this notification. We recommend that you select a template from the Remind Before Due Date (User) section of this drop-down menu.
4. Eye Icon: Click this icon to preview the notification.
5. Save: Click this button to save your notification settings.

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