Best Practices

Have you ever noticed how a new movie comes out and it seems like suddenly everyone is talking about it? Social media and online news certainly play a role in this phenomenon, but there’s something more basic happening here. People like to be in the know and feel like they belong. 

This human tendency to create and follow cultural trends can work to your advantage when planning and marketing classes. If you know what’s trending, you have a better idea of what’s likely to interest or excite your students. Just learning to spot these trends is half the battle. We’ll show you where to look for current cultural trends and how to use these events to build irresistible classes.

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Accessibility should be a top priority for any course content creator. Accessible content helps everyone access and engage with your lessons, whether you’re teaching in-person or online. That allows you to reach more learners and offer more engaging educational experiences. 

When you hear the word “accessible,” you may think of ways to make a building or website more user-friendly. This may include adding wheelchair ramps or using easy-to-read color combinations. When it comes to course creation, accessibility has much broader applications.  It’s about supporting every potential student regardless of their physical, cognitive, technological, situational, or socioeconomic challenges.

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Your program couldn’t exist without your instructors. You can have the best marketing, the simplest registration system, and the most interesting course offerings, but it’s teachers who make your classes possible. In this post, we’ll explore how to celebrate Teacher Appreciation Week to show appreciation and respect to all educators.

This year, Teacher Appreciation Week is May 8-12, 2023, which makes it a great time to show your instructors how much you appreciate them. Saying “thank you” is especially important right now. Many educators have had to navigate new ways of teaching and extra challenges over the last few years.

Teacher appreciation doesn’t have to be expensive or complicated. Sincerity and thoughtfulness go a long way. We’ve put together a list of ways your adult or community education program or arts program can celebrate Teacher Appreciation Week.

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The nosy neighbor. The cantankerous co-worker. The level-headed lifeguard. We tend to create character sketches of people in our lives to help us learn to interact with them. This tendency to try to understand people can help you create a valuable marketing tool: student personas.

Student personas are representations of your ideal students based on what you know and understand about people in your target audience. You can think of them like composite sketches of your ideal students. Using student personas will help you better understand the needs, motivations, and behaviors of your students. This information can help shape your program’s marketing and sales strategies so you can ultimately get more registrations for your classes.

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Marketing kids’ art classes—or any classes targeted to children—is a delicate balance. Although you’re offering art classes for kids, or summer camps, or theater workshops, or any other youth classes, it’s usually the parents who are researching options and making the decision to register. As a result, your organization needs to advertise, promote, and share classes in a way that appeals to parents while making it clear that the class will be enjoyable for kids. 

Getting this right means answering all the questions a parent may have about the class while keeping a sense of playfulness and fun. We’ll show you how to strike this balance, plus give you some insight into what exactly parents are looking for when choosing art classes for kids.

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What do the Nike Swoosh logo, a Tiffany Blue Box® wrapped in white ribbon, and the Intel audio chime all have in common? They’re all examples of branding. Each one serves as a unique identifier that customers can recognize and identify with. Even without the marketing budget of these globally recognizable brands, your education program can still implement brand basics. 

Branding is important because it distinguishes your organization or education program as unique, special, and worthy of attention. Consistently repeating brand elements creates a lasting impression in the minds of your students and helps to build trust and loyalty. We’ll introduce you to some branding basics so you can start to develop a branding strategy that capitalizes on your program’s uniqueness.

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Imagine students eagerly enrolling in your program without any significant marketing efforts on your part. It is possible, if you do one thing: learn how to ask for referrals.

Referrals and word-of-mouth recommendations are some of the most powerful marketing tools you have. In fact, 81% of people say they trust the advice of friends and family over the word of a business. By encouraging students to talk about your classes to their networks, you can build a steady stream of high-quality leads who may become loyal students. 

When your students recommend a class to their friends and family, it’s not only an affirmation of your program. It’s also a way to increase engagement and build a sense of community among peers. We’ll share some tips on how to ask for referrals, as well as how to use them as part of your overall marketing strategy.

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ChatGPT might just be the biggest game changer in technology since the iPhone. Developed by the software company OpenAI, ChatGPT is a chatbot designed to produce language that sounds human. Users interact with the bot by typing questions, and the bot responds with answers that sound like they could have been written by a human.

Not only is the new chatbot an impressive step forward for artificial intelligence, it has also elicited controversy and strong opinions. Many who work in academia, education, or writing-heavy fields worry that the AI model presents copyright concerns, plagiarism issues, and a move away from the human element in writing. 

Ultimately, ChatGPT is a tool. We’ll take a look at how you might use it to write course descriptions, titles, and other content, as well as the potential pitfalls to be aware of if you do. 

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It can happen to any informal ed program. You check on the sign-ups for an upcoming class and realize enrollment is low. So low that you might have to cancel the class if you don’t get a few more students signed up quickly. Don’t worry—there is something you can do to boost last-minute enrollment and save the class.

Low enrollment warnings are emails sent to the students and instructor of a course that’s facing potential cancellation due to lack of sign-ups. These emails can mobilize students and instructors to take action and save a low enrollment course. 

Let’s take a look at why low enrollment happens and how you can use CourseStorm’s automatic low enrollment warnings to avoid having to cancel classes.

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It might surprise you to know that your course catalog is a marketing asset—in fact, it’s one of your strongest ones. If you’re making some common course catalog mistakes, you might be losing students without even knowing it. Finding and retaining students is already a challenge. You don’t want your own program’s materials to turn students away. 

Just as you give careful attention to your social media posts and your website content, your course catalog is equally deserving of the same treatment. We’ll review some simple steps you can take to avoid the most common course catalog mistakes and offer some quick fixes to produce a user-friendly catalog. 

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