Feature: In the People List, you can now click the "Status" column to sort by status (Active, Former, etc.). Feature: We have improved the Billing Statement format to be more readable. It also now shows account credits, if any. Feature: You can now choose to send statements to only those who have an outstanding balance Note: Removed Feedback boxes on student/parent/teacher accounts. BugFix: The Invoices/Payments report was not showing...
Read MoreGrow your studio by building a team — keep in touch with your teachers! Teachers are the heart of your studio
; you want them engaged and happy. After all, they are the ones who bring their energy to the students.
You may be a teacher yourself, but in your role as studio manager, you are in a position of leadership, and set the tone for your studio. Keeping in touch with your teachers, and responsive to them, sets an example that makes them feel more engaged in the studio, and in turn, they will pass that positive feeling about your studio along to their students.
Let’s discuss ways to be involved with teachers without being intrusive. Each idea has its opportunities and challenges — staff meetings, studio-wide events, benefits, thank-yous, and other communications.
Happy New Year! We hope your studio is off to a great new start for 2011! Now is the perfect time to review how you’re doing in your business, and your goals for the coming year. If you use Studio Helper to manage your studio, you know how helpful it is to have your business contacts, schedules, and finances organized all in one place. If...
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Lately I have become obsessed with social media and how I can use it to better and more efficiently communicate with my clients. In my case, I run a music school in Brooklyn, NY (www.BrooklynMusicFactory.com) and so I am in regular communication with about 60 registered students and parents. Let’s review briefly the traditional ways of communicating:
The question we, as studio or school owners need to ask ourselves is how effective are these forms of networking and communicating. Are they resulting in an expanded network that is blossoming into a larger client base? Or as my brother, a studio owner in Nashville, TN, pointed out, often it feels as though he keeps running into the same people at every party he throws (his main form of promotion/networking). His client base is not expanding through the channels that seemed to work only a few years ago. The traditional forms of networking can and still do work for some (my connection to and participation in my children’s school is still the strongest networking tool I have), but times are changing and our clients are turning elsewhere for advice and guidance when choosing teachers, studios, schools, etc.
Keep in touch with your students. You could call them your customers, since managing a studio is running a business. But whether you call them customers, or simply your students, there is one important way to make sure you keep in touch with their needs: Always keep in mind that behind that email address, that phone number, that invoice, that payment, is a real person.
Now, this may seem obvious, but there are many times when other concerns get in the way. And those are often exactly the times when you need to remember how to treat your students well.
It is important to be efficient with your time, but don’t sacrifice your students for the sake of “efficiency.” For example, those mass emails you can do in Studio Helper – it might be tempting to toss out the same message to everybody, but should you? Think through what you are saying, and to whom you are saying it. Make an email template that allows you to personalize the message by including each recipient’s name, and then think carefully. Do you really want to send that note about payments to students who have already paid? Do you want to ask for more signups for the recital and include those who have already signed up?
It’s worth a little extra time to think about such communications with students. Above all, it’s important to be consistent in your treatment of them. Using Studio Helper is a big step because