Matt has over 20 years of experience in the software industry. As the founder or co-founder of four software companies, he comprehensively understands technology, design, operations, finance, sales, marketing, and customer service. Matt co-founded CourseStorm to connect learners to classes where they can gain education a la carte to enrich their lives through art classes, prepare for a new job, or level up their existing skills.
A smart and capable person can achieve a lot on their own, but they can do even more if they’re well connected. We think it’s the same with software. Connecting CourseStorm software with the other tools and solutions you use regularly, means you can do more with less effort.Software integrations, as we previously explored, lift the burden of data entry so your team can focus on supporting students, patrons, and instructors.
In this article, we’re introducing you to our top five most popular software integrations. These are the top five ways that our clients connect CourseStorm software with other digital and online tools. We’ll show you how they can save you time and money and give you some examples for why you might want to try them.
It’s been a busy time at CourseStorm, and we’re glad to finally have the time to formally welcome Marketing Manager Nicole Lyons and SalesAccount Representative Tricia Cooke to the CourseStorm team!
“Our strength at CourseStorm has always come from the strength of our team. As the company continues to expand, we are always on the hunt for helpful, growth-oriented people to join in our journey, and Nicole and Tricia certainly fit that mold,” commented Brian Rahill, CourseStorm CEO. “We are excited by the impact they will make in helping us streamline access to education for students nationwide.”
“There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.” — Willa Cather
We have been carefully watching the effects that COVID-19 has had across the country, particularly on educational programs.
We understand the challenges that you’re working through: concerns about lost revenue, ongoing expenses, and what registration volume may look like for your organization over the near and medium-term.
While we can’t tell you when things will return to “normal,” we’re confident that normalcy will return. To that end, we’d like to share some strategies to help provide continuity for your organization and learning community over the coming weeks and months.
Instead of Cancelling
While your first reaction might be to cancel classes altogether, there are other options at your disposal that you may be overlooking.
#1: Don’t cancel, postpone
No one really wants a class to cancel. Not you, not the instructor, nor the students who were excited to attend. While they may be absent for the next few weeks during this crisis, their interest in class is unlikely to abate. If you can, consider postponing your classes instead of canceling, so that when things calm down, everyone can still get the class they were looking forward to. Postponing also allows you to keep more cash with your organization rather than refunding it all back to the student.
#2: Consider remote instruction
Follow the lead of many higher education institutions and consider temporarily shifting existing classes to remote instruction through video. Many classes and presentations can be live broadcast to attendees with affordable and accessible software solutions. From Vimeo or YouTube’s live streaming services to conferencing providers like Google Hangouts Meet, Zoom, and GoToMeeting.
For example, rather than cancel a show, one arts organization we follow is recording its spring youth drama performance and providing streaming video access to its ticket holders. A great, creative solution to the problem at hand!
If you must cancel
We understand. Here are some tips to help reduce the impact to your program.
#1 Use promo codes
Instead of refunds, offer customers credit for future classes to replace the class they’re unable to take. As mentioned above, this helps your business keep cash on hand which is more important than ever when facing unprecedented circumstances.
#2: Convert to donation
Give your students the chance to donate the cost of their class to your program rather than take a refund.
#3: Increase your online class offerings
Consider adding classes to your program that are already designed for independent learning. For community education programs, ed2go offers a suite of excellent online classes you can resell at your program.
#4: Call your insurance agent
Your organization may have insurance coverage that can help reduce the effect of the disruption (ask about coverage from “event insurance” or “business disruption insurance”). It’s certainly worth checking with your provider.
#5: Use this downtime to prepare for the upswing
While your program may be quiet over the coming weeks, this is a perfect time to start planning your next move. After lots of time stuck indoors, students will be jumping at the chance to make up for lost time. With proper planning, you can be sure to be there right when they need you.
Keep in mind that decisions made today don’t have to be final or absolute. It’s ok to make a decision that affects your immediate needs without trying to plan for the entire future. Use this opportunity to run an experiment and try something new. If it works, you may just end up with a new tool in your toolbelt!
More resources to come
While all this continues to unfold, we at CourseStorm will be researching best practices and providing resources to help affected programs make the best of a hard situation.
We genuinely respect that this situation is causing a financial burden for many programs and we’re working on a plan to help lessen the financial burden for our most heavily affected clients. We will be sharing more information about our plans in the coming week.
Until then, even if we’re technically isolated, we will all be pulling together, learning together, and adapting together.
As members of CourseStorm’s Product Team, we’re always looking forward to what we can build next to make managing registrations even simpler and make our user experience even better for programs around the country. But it’s also important to take a minute and look back at what we’ve been able to accomplish thanks to feedback and input from CourseStorm users!
Here’s a recap of some of the top updates we released in 2019.
We often talk with representatives from programs that use CourseStorm, and a lot of times we notice trends regardless of the size or type of organization. Two of these have been on my mind lately:
It’s really important to advertise your classes if you want to maximize your registrations.
People who work at educational programs are really busy and really don’t want to spend time advertising their classes. There’s so much else to do!
Seeing them together makes the geeky engineer gears in my brain start to turn. Is there a way we can help on both counts? We believe the answer is a resounding yes.
Today we’re announcing the beta program of our latest feature: automatic email marketing. If you choose to enable this new feature on your site, we’ll periodically send an email to selected students advertising classes that we believe will be of interest to them. We use a number of factors to create personalized recommendations for each individual student, and we let students start a registration for their next class with just a couple of clicks.
The best part? There’s nothing you have to do. We’ll choose the best times to send emails and the best matches for students, meaning you can spend your time making your program and your classes the best they can be.
We’re excited to do everything we can to help your program grow and thrive. We hope automatic email marketing will be one more way to help you increase enrollments!
UPDATE: We’re currently in the process of rolling out automatic email marketing to all CourseStorm sites. If you’d like to learn more about how to enable it in your catalog, visit our help site.
At CourseStorm we want to do everything we can to connect people with education, removing whatever roadblocks we can for students and for programs. As organizations that run workshops, camps, or advanced classes know, one of those hurdles is often the cost of enrollment. That’s why we’ve always been really proud of CourseStorm’s effortless payment plans – and why today we’re excited to announce that they’re better than ever.
Starting today, programs have two options for payment plans. You can still use the impossibly simple payment plan CourseStorm users know and love: enter a deposit and a date by which you’d like all funds paid and we’ll handle the rest – no scheduling or math required! But if you’d like fine-grained control, opt for a new custom payment schedule. We’ve kept it simple for you: we just need a date to start payments, an amount to pay, and whether you’d like the payments weekly or monthly. That’s it!
Today’s update has to do with one of the best parts of the online class registration process: getting paid! We’ve just launched site-specific descriptions for bank statements that make managing catalog networks easier than ever.
CourseStorm has built-in support for networks of sites. This option is great for anywhere that has different programs or departments: each program can have its own catalog while still allowing all classes to be combined under a single umbrella site. All kinds of organizations – from hospitals to community colleges to training programs – use CourseStorm networks to manage registrations for all of their locations or divisions. But when payouts started rolling in, it was a little confusing to match which payout came from which site.
Payment plans in CourseStorm are a hassle-free option to manage payment for classes that are over $100. If you enable payment plans for a class, we’ll automatically create a plan based on when someone registers and the date by which you want all your funds collected. No need to worry about schedules or amounts.
We’re always looking for new ways to make managing payment plans even easier for administrators, and today we’re excited to talk about two recently-launched features: rescheduling individual payments and changing the credit card for a payment plan once the plan is in progress.
You’ve set up your classes for online registration with CourseStorm, and your catalog’s ready to go. There’s a good chance you have a site of your own, though, and you’d love to include a list of your classes on your site. Fortunately we make this really easy with the CourseStorm class list widget!
Our widget allows you to plug in a bit of JavaScript code to your site that will load classes from your CourseStorm catalog. Even better, you have complete control on how you style the list of your classes; if you know CSS or know web designers who do, you can make our widget appear seamlessly with the existing design of your site.
CourseStorm provides an easy way for students to sign up for your classes, but we’ve heard from a number of programs having a way to manage students once classes begins would be really helpful as well. That’s why we’re really excited to announce a brand-new feature: printable rosters!
Printing a roster in CourseStorm couldn’t be easier. On any class’s roster, simply click the “Print Roster” button in the top right corner of the student list. We’ll automatically generate a PDF file for you with each student’s name and contact information. These new rosters are great for attendance as well! We give you ten empty columns to use as you wish. We also provide a few blank rows in case there are any changes or drop-in students.
