Feature Spotlight

If you’re creating and selling classes for kids, you’re already an expert in the subject you teach. What may be less familiar is the process for marketing and selling courses. Turning to class marketplaces like Sawyer can seem like an easy solution to this challenge. Just put it on the platform and parents will be able to find it … right?

The truth is that it’s easy to get lost on a course marketplace. Your brand fades into the background and the platform is front-and-center. What’s worse is that the platform takes a chunk of every transaction, with rates as high as 30% on top of standard transaction fees and booking fees. You’re trading a little convenience for a big cut in revenue. 

If you’re thinking, there has to be another solution, you’re right. Let’s compare Sawyer head-to-head against CourseStorm’s online class registration system.

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Over the last couple of months, we’ve made 4 releases to our Universal Transfers beta program and have unlocked some great new functionality for those customers. It’s now impossibly simple to perform transfers between classes of different prices and have CourseStorm automate the necessary charges and refunds for those transfers.

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Have you ever stopped to think about how software integration makes your life easier? For example, you can donate to a cause and seconds later invite your social media followers to do the same—without even leaving the thank-you screen.

You can’t see it, but there’s an integration at work there, connecting the donation website to a social media platform. If you’ve never really stopped to think about how these processes work, that probably means they’re working well. The whole point of a software integration is to create automated workflows that you don’t have to think about.  

Before you can put these useful automation tools to work for you, you’ll need to understand something about what they are and how they can help. 

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At CourseStorm, we’re always thinking about how to make our class registration software impossibly simple to use for education program managers and students. Our admin area lets staff and administrators log in to manage classes and registrations. Our student log in area allows students to change their contact information themselves, among other things.

Here are some answers to frequently asked questions about CourseStorm logins and other common actions. 

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Informal ed programs need a registration management solution that meets their needs and their budget. If you’re looking for a new registration management software solution, Learning Stream might be on your list of tools to check out. They promote themselves as your “registration management concierge.” Sounds fancy, right? 

At first glance, Learning Stream has a lot to offer. While the platform includes plenty of features, it might be a more complex tool than most informal ed programs need. And complexity probably isn’t on your list of must-haves when it comes to choosing registration management software. There are several Learning Stream alternatives out there. To help you make an informed decision, we’re comparing Learning Stream head-to-head with CourseStorm’s simple registration management software. 

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Everyone here at CourseStorm hopes you had a great October! The team here has been hard at work launching new features and updates and we plan to continue that habit with another feature launch before the end of the year.

Text Message Reminders

It’s no secret that for years now, folks have been relying more and more on their mobile phones as their primary means of communication. Email is great, but nothing beats a nice, short text message for a quick notification.

So it gives me great pleasure to let you know that before the end of the year, we’ll be releasing automated, text message reminders for students!

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We recently announced we’d be helping CourseStorm customers more deeply integrate with online classes. As many of you are turning to new ways to accommodate your students, we are prioritizing CourseStorm feature updates that can make the biggest impact for you.

To that end, today we’re announcing two new features — both designed to make running online classes easier: customizable receipt emails and file attachments. 

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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.

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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.

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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.