New Feature

Hey everyone, Matt here!

As you may know, we kicked off this year with a driving focus: to talk to as many customers as we can to learn more about what you like and don’t like about using the CourseStorm product. I can’t tell you how much I love talking with customers and appreciate the treasure trove of feedback that you all have given us, both good and bad!

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Today, I’d love to tell you about some work going on under the hood to improve the performance and security of CourseStorm for all of you. It may get a bit nerdy, but I’ll try to keep things brief!

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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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Hi everyone! It’s Matt from CourseStorm again.

Hot off the heels of our recent launches, I’m pleased to tell you about some upcoming releases in our pipeline, including a preview of one of the powerful new financial features I’ve been talking about.

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Hi everyone! It’s Matt from CourseStorm.

I wanted to take a moment and give an update on some great new features we’ve been working on here at HQ. Some of these updates you’ll be seeing before the end of the month and for some other, larger updates we’ll be sharing more info throughout the coming months. It’s definitely an exciting and busy time for our team and we can’t wait to share it all with you!

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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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We are streamlining registration for online classes.

From the beginning, our mission at CourseStorm has been to streamline access to education. It’s what drives our entire company every day. It’s built-in to our pay-as-you-go business model, the smooth design of our software, and the deliberate decision to focus on lifelong learning. In short, it’s in our DNA.

And we’re confident that the customers we’ve served across the US would agree we’ve done an excellent job. On average, CourseStorm customers have seen a 12% increase in registrations year-over-year as we continually add new ways to help them reach more learners.

In our continual effort to expand access to education, today we are announcing yet another way to help programs reach more learners: deeper integration with online classes.

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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.

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!

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You all have great websites and we understand that your classes can sometimes feel a bit separate living at CourseStorm.

So we thought, “Wouldn’t it be great if you could see all those classes right on your own website?”

Well – now you can!

Allow us to introduce CourseStorm Class Registration for WordPress!

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