Last week I shared our vision and purpose. Today I want to talk about the path we will follow in 2019 to make our dreams come true.
Workshop Butler helps training businesses to free themselves from administrative routine. It does it through automation and collaboration. These two themes define most of the new features we plan to deliver this year. Let’s take a look.
Collaboration
Last year we finalised the concept of account. There are three types of accounts available: individual trainers, training companies, and certification bodies, or brands. Any user can access several accounts and switch between them depending on the role she is playing at the moment.
For example, meet Alice. Alice is a trainer and runs workshops monthly. At the same time, Alice helps BeAwesome company to organise courses for its trainers. There is no need to create two separate users for that. The BeAwesome company adds Alice as manager. Now Alice can switch to BeAwesome account right from Workshop Butler cabinet, without logging out and logging in again.
However, scenarios like this one are not the main benefit of accounts. It is various collaboration options which become available thanks to them. For example, workshops.
The BeAwesome company wants Alice to run a licensed BeStrong workshop for them, which are licensed by BeStronger certification body. They invite Alice as an external trainer and create a workshop on her behalf. Now BeAwesome, Alice and BeStronger could see this workshop. The workshop is visible on their websites (yes, all three!) and students can register to it from any of them. If BeAwesome decides to change dates or prices, these changes become instantly available on all accounts and websites.
So far we have these collaboration options:
- Certification bodies can give trainers the licenses
- Trainers can invite other trainers to run workshops together
- Training companies can ask trainers to run workshops and manage these workshops for them
And here what we plan.
Training Company ↔ Trainer
We will improve the management of trainer accounts for training companies. A company will be able to add or remove workshop categories to trainers, fire trainers or delete their accounts entirely.
The UI for workshops will be reworked. Both trainers and training companies can choose who manages a training, how gets workshops-related notifications, etc.
Training Companies will also get the ability to renew and cancel license subscriptions on behalf of trainers.
Certification Body ↔ Training Company
Certification Bodies will be able to invoice training companies for all their trainers at once, both license subscriptions and workshop fees. For example, if BeAwesome company has three licensed BeStrong trainers, BeStronger can send one invoice for all three subscriptions.
Certification Body ↔ Trainer
The renewal and cancellation UI will be improved. Trainers will be able to renew an expired license easily.
Trainer ↔ Trainer
Current collaboration UI will be reworked from scratch to make the process easier and joyful.
Student Accounts
There is a chance that we’ll introduce student accounts this year. If you’re interested in this feature, please, reach us to discuss more.
Automation
Though there are plenty of things we want to do with collaboration, we will spend most of our time on automating more administrative tasks. And the brilliance of accounts plays here as well. In most cases, the automation for one type of account can be used by other types of accounts. For example, the subscription of attendees to MailChimp lists is identical for trainers and training companies.
API
We will make our API more comprehensive, vibrant and open. It will be much easier to integrate another product with Workshop Butler.
Zapier
We will open Zapier to all types of accounts and provide new actions and objects to operate with.
Invoice Automation
Certification Bodies will be able to connect their invoice management software and send invoices to trainers and training companies for workshops and subscriptions. They can see from the cabinet what subscriptions and workshop are still pending the payment, and check invoices right from UI.
Training Companies and Trainers will be able to see invoices from Certification Bodies in UI. They will also get the ability to send invoices to students, both via connected invoice management software and created by Workshop Butler.
Website Integration
Our website integration plugins, released last autumn, were a hit. We will make them more configurable, SEO-friendly and more natural to set up. We will also add several new types of widgets for you to use.
Email Automation
There are a couple of email sequences built into Workshop Butler. The first set of messages is sent to attendees when they register for a workshop: a welcome email, a reminder, etc. The second set of messages is sent to trainers when their license subscription is about to expire. These sequences are quite static, and users can change only a few things.
We will introduce a more complex and more configurable mechanism for email sequences.
Webhooks
Multiple webhooks will become available for certain types of plans making the integration with other products more accessible than ever.
Mix
Besides automation and collaboration tasks, we will also work on improving user experience and some platform-related features like better in-app and email notifications.
Of course, everything you see above is bold brush strokes. Something else may get higher priority based on your feedback and requests. However, it stays around our two main themes - automation and collaboration.
