Last week we had a great talk with Linda Nelson, Executive Director of the North Carolina Association of Independent Schools about Visnet, a virtual independent school network that provides professional development, online education, blended learning, learning management systems and academic support to independent schools associations. Regpack has worked with Visnet to create a course registration system to capture students’ information for class registration as well as to collect payments. Visnet is enjoying Regpack’s conditional logic functionality to filter and display to users only the classes that individual is interested in based on their answers to previous questions in the application. Linda and Visnet were on the hunt for a system that could handle these needs as well as others and didn’t think they could find it with an easy to use and budget friendly solution. But they did! And they couldn’t be happier. Read on to find out more about Visnet and Regpack’s blossoming relationship! To learn more about Visnet check out this awesome video.
Tell me a little about Visnet.
Visnet is a consortium of online resources and programs for independent schools. Independent schools are private schools that have an independent government structure and they are K-12 schools. One of the things we offer through Visnet are online courses that are both supplemental and enrichment based for our schools. If they need extra AP courses or if they don’t have a Japanese teacher on staff or students want to take Psychology but they don’t offer that as part of their curriculum or if a student needs to catch up and do a credit recovery type course, they can take one of those courses online through us.
With many different course registration systems out there, why did you pick Regpack?
We were looking for an ecommerce system that would support what we wanted to do, mainly registering for our courses and collecting payments. I started looking around at different programs and had a conversation with Asaf. Regpack was just very customer oriented and willing to customize it to suit our needs and it just felt like even the shell of what they had fit our needs a whole lot better than anything else I saw. On top of that, Regpack was willing to make some modifications and set it up to really suit our particular needs and that made it a no-brainer for us. Regpack has been great to work with and we’ve found it to be a great solution. I was afraid I was going to have go out and have something custom developed for us, which would come with a very expensive price tag, and it hasn’t been that way. Regpack has been so affordable and really accessible and our Account Manager has been great to work with. All we need to do is call and they’re very receptive and responsive.
How was setting up your registration online with Regpack?
We took what we had been using before with our provider, who had previously handled our registration and payment collection. We then, within our staff, sat down and worked through the process in terms of what we wanted it to look like, this is the information that we need, so what do we want the customer experience to be like. They will login to the system so what makes sense, what questions do we have to ask first, what is the person on the other end going to need to know in order to answer the question, how do we need to group courses so that the customer can get to what they want so it’s not overwhelming but we’re giving them enough choices. Regpack was really helpful in building our system using conditional logic, so they were helpful to us in making those choices and we feel really good about what we have. There are a couple of additional upgrades we’ve requested and Regpack has been really responsive so we should have those up in the next week!
We’re also moving towards switching over our other programs over to Regpack. We do a lot of professional development and we’re also talking about switching over all of our registration for conferences and workshops and webinars and things like that. We’re talking about doing different looks, and running through Regpack as well. We’re going to continue to grow with Regpack!
How are using the email and statistics features Regpack’s software provides, especially when it comes to managing your invoicing and payments?
We are using the system to send notifications and we are using the tracking ability and the analysis and reports. Stephanie, who does that is finding all of that very helpful. That was one thing we were looking for as well. We thought, if we’re going to have to do our own invoicing and if we have to manually track all this and set up some sort of a database or spreadsheet to track it is going to be a nightmare. So the ability to register online, pay online and to track it and then run reports is saving us a lot of time.
Since our schools have not been thrilled with the idea of using credit cards, Regpack has allowed us to use the e-Check payment solution, which eliminates the fee associated with the credit card option. Having payment and registration taking place in one place streamlines the process for our schools and for us. Regpack also allows our schools to pay for multiple registrations at one time which was not something we could do before.
Would you recommend Regpack to other educational management companies?
Absolutely. I can’t imagine using another software. I did research online and spoke with our web provider about putting something together, talked with some other registration organizations and I’ve dealt with some others through our conference work. I just found Regpack to be very customer service oriented, very willing to customize and I think that their platform is very flexible so you can make it look and feel like you want it to and add different functionalities. The cost — it’s very affordable. I was really pleasantly surprised to know what it was going to cost us each month. I would definitely recommend it. In today’s world it’s hard to get folks to do what they say and Regpack has really done that for us.