Attendees in Workshop Butler had two statuses: Participated and Not participated. These states were important as some actions (like follow-up emails) applied only to attendees in one or another status. However, there was one case which wasn’t supported well — the cancellation of attendance. There were two ways to handle it: leave a cancelled attendee as Not participated or delete him entirely from the system. Neither of these options was good enough.
After a couple weeks of silence, we’re happy to present our latest new addition — all new invoice module, and, in particular, redefined workflow for workshop invoices. Why an invoice module? When we just started working on it, we tried to solve one specific request from several clients — make it possible to automate the invoicing process. More licensed workshops per month you have, more time you need to spend on manual creation of invoices.
Back in March, we announced our plans to make Workshop Butler more open for integrations. We believe it will lead to more automated workflows and a considerably smaller amount of hours spent on managing workshops and trainers. And integration with Zapier was at the top of the list. Though trainers could send attendees, workshops and evaluations via Zapier to thousands of services for more than two years, training companies and certification bodies lacked this option.
Certificates are de-facto standard in today’s professional education. Though many trainers and facilitators have a strong opinion against an existing system, as it has its obvious flaws, most students expect to receive a certificate after course. At least as proof of their attendance. As a result, any certification brand or body needs to invest some time and money into this area, from the design of certificates to the logistic of delivering certificates to students.
Since launching new website integration plugins several months ago, we received very positive feedback from many customers. Jason Little of Lean Change Management brand said: Not having to write my own JavaScript integrations helped a lot, especially because more facilitators were added, more courses were added, so the sorting and the filtering and the updated pages for workshops and facilitators which helped to promote them, saved me a lot of time.
From the very beginning, we knew that a good website integration could enormously help training businesses to automate the process of workshop administration. However, the first version of our integration widgets was not a big success. Instead of looking at the customers’ needs, we concentrated on our ideas and created a piece of excellent working software rarely used. Today we are introducing the next generation of our widgets for website integration.
Communication with attendees via email is an integral part of any workshop. Giving your students a warm welcome right after the registration removes the fear that the registration has not happened, and helps to establish a rapport from the very beginning. Sending a reminder one or two days before the event shows participants you care about them. Asking people for feedback on their experience creates opportunities for professional growth and marketing.
The GDPR takes seriously how you collect consents to process personal data of EU citizens. The participation in a workshop gives you a legal right to work with a personal data of the attendee. However, there are more: for example, you must collect separate consents for processing personal data and subscribing to a newsletter an attendee can request anytime to review what consents were given, and how they were collected.
Being able to define what information to collect from attendees is important for many trainers. It helps them to decrease the time they spend on pre-workshop communication with participants. For example, by requesting Billing Address or Dietary Preferences. In Workshop Butler, trainers have been enjoying fully customisable registration forms for more than a year now. It is no surprise that we wanted to give this flexibility to training companies, the support for which we added about two months ago.
Though Workshop Butler provides quite extensive support for automated emails before and after each event, from time to time you may need to send a manual email to event attendees. For example, an event location has changed, or you want to give additional materials before a workshop, or you decide to reach persons who registered but didn’t attend an event. With Workshop Butler, you can do it quickly, without adding many addresses to BCC or CC and checking two-three times that you included everyone.