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.
Here at CourseStorm HQ, we consider it our job to make it simple for students to connect to those great classes of yours. So, as you might imagine, we’re about as disappointed as anyone when a class has to cancel because there just aren’t enough students registered. It’s not great for you and your team who have worked hard to make the class available, it’s not great for the instructor who’s excited to share their knowledge, and it’s not great for the students who were really looking forward to taking that class!
Well, thankfully, just in time for Fall registration, we’re adding a brand new way to help you cancel fewer classes, automatically, and it’s launching today!
We hope you’re all having a great Spring! Here in Maine, we’re definitely excited to see the warmer weather and have already taken the opportunity to get outside for some fresh air. But that’s not all we’ve been up to!
We’re thrilled to work with educational organizations across the country from small, two-person operations to those with a larger staff and thousands of registrations per year. But there’s one thing you all have in common — there’s never enough time!
We know how you feel, so we’ve been hard at work on new time-saving features to let you spend more time with your students and less time on office work.
As the old saying goes, “A rolling stone gathers no moss.” That’s exactly how we feel at CourseStorm. So, another week – another update! Hot off the presses of our last release, we’ve made another great addition to CourseStorm. And this time, the feature is for your students!
Since our last update, our team has been hard at work and last week we released a handful of features that we think will make your day-to-day use of CourseStorm even better!
One of CourseStorm’s key features is the ability to customize your registration forms. You can get lots of feedback and you can provide content like file attachments in your forms as well!
Comments Off on Grow Your Program Part 2: Things That Sell Classes
We’re excited to continue the Grow Your Program series to help our customers and anyone out there looking to sell more classes (see also our previous entry on effective website use). Today’s focus: Things That Sell Classes.
A lot of thoughts go into helping register more students for your classes, but today we’ll be focusing on a few of the most important: photos, instructors, and location info.
Before we get into that, however, it’s important to note that there is one thing that’s more important than all of those and without it you’re losing about 25% or more of your customers: a simple way to register online. When people go to your website, they’re not just looking for the class to take, but they want to register right then. The more steps you put in the way of each student registering for the class, the more of them will walk away. And the simplest way to make that registration right when they want to sign up is to offer online registration where students can use their credit card. Even if you don’t use CourseStorm for that online registration — make sure you make it easy for them. It makes all the difference in the world.
But, I digress. Let’s get on to the rest of our tips! 🙂
Here at CourseStorm, we’re very big on spending as much time as possible on helping our customers, whether that be with individual phone and email support, creating new features to make things even easier, or dreaming up our next big concept. Sometimes we spend so much time in-deep giving each of our customers a great experience that we don’t spend enough time telling everyone what an excellent company we have and what great stuff we’re working on.
Well, thanks to the wonderful startup and entrepreneurship community in Maine, we’ve been given the chance to tell our story. Read more
Here at CourseStorm, we specialize in helping programs to grow. That’s how we’ve helped our customers reach 30% more students each year online, doubling the size of their programs in less than 3 years. We recently had the opportunity to give a workshop at an Association conference to pass along some of our knowledge. The reaction was so positive, we thought it’d be great to share the same information with everyone via a series of blog posts we’re calling Grow Your Program.
We are very excited to have been selected as finalists for the Top Gun Entrepreneurship Program‘s pitch contest. The showcase event, featuring pitches from 10 fantastic companies across Maine, will be held at The Abromson Center at the University of Southern Maine on Wednesday, June 3rd (otherwise known as tomorrow). If you’re interested in attending to see CourseStorm co-founder Matt James deliver the pitch for parents looking to simplify the process of registering their children for activities, register to attend here.
Or, if you’re a Maine-based entrepreneur looking to grow your business, build additional skills, and extend your professional network, we highly recommend participating in future classes of Top Gun. It’s a great program!
As promised, hot off the heels of our update last week, we’ve brought in features to give you more control over your student records. Just like your students, you can now update student records right from the admin area.
