Feature Spotlight

A couple of weeks ago we told you all about our latest feature that effortlessly sends personalized recommendations to each of your students.

Students can receive personalized recommendations based on their registration history, making sure they know about classes they won’t want to miss! We’ll keep your students informed about what’s going on, and you don’t have to do any extra work.

Read more

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!

Read more

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.

Read more

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.

Read more

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.

Read more

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.

Read more

Are you looking for a quick way for registrants to save classes to their personal calendars?

Our latest update gives your registrants that convenience.  With the click of a button in a registrant’s receipt email, she can now save the newly-registered class. Each calendar event will include the event’s name, registrant names, date & time, location, and description. And the button works with any calendar software that supports the ICS format (Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, Outlook, and more).

Read more

This year we’re working hard to make it even easier to integrate CourseStorm into your website. With our brand new CourseStorm for WordPress plugin, we’re closer than ever to that goal.

What can it do?

Our new WordPress plugin allows you to list and display information about your classes on your website. This has the benefit of keeping people on your website longer and allowing them to browse your catalog from within your website.

The plugin will display a list of your categories, a slider for featured classes, a listing of classes in a category, and individual class pages.

Read more

We’re wrapping up 2018 with a batch of new features for registrations. To start, we’ve revealed more about the registrations you receive through CourseStorm. We’ve added a new way to give you more information than ever about where a registration stands with our new registration detail screens.

These two new screens open up information about registrations you’ve never been able to access in the administration area before – including a schedule of upcoming payments! It also provides a home for a number of new features we’ll be adding in the coming weeks.

Read more