Case Study: Handmade Parenting

Lisa Weiner is a certified Simplicity Parenting Counselor and Family Coach. She's been offering parenting courses locally for years. She also travels to present Simplicity Parenting workshops-- and people across the country have been asking if they can take her parenting courses as well. She needed a way to recreate the vibrant, interactive class experience for students across the country (and in different time zones).

Some of the more interesting problems we solved together:

Handmade Parenting needed a design facelift to reflect the simple, handmade feel central to Lisa's philosophy.
The new design had to make it easier for people to find her course and coaching offerings, but keep her blog content front-and-center as well.
The course needed to be mobile-friendly and open 24/7, to make it easy for parents to participate when (and where) it's convenient.
An online forum lets parents ask Lisa questions during her daily "office hours" online, but perhaps more importantly, it brings class members into a supportive parent community.
Weekly Group Coaching calls via Zoom video conferencing brings the whole group together to ask questions and get one on one support from Lisa. For parents with scheduling conflicts, the calls are recorded and posted for later viewing.
Short daily videos and homework assignments based on Lisa's local Simplicity Parenting 101 course presentations bring the flavor of a live class into people's homes.

Responsive Design

Interactivity

It can be difficult to replicate the spirited discussion and problem solving of a live class online. Lisa needed a way to allow her class to work through sticky parenting issues together, but it had to work for students spread out across the country (and who might not be able to make a call).

Solution: Daily Office Hours in the Forum

Each participant has an opportunity to engage with the class and with Lisa directly via the online forum.

Daily Forum Office Hours

Solution: Live Group Coaching Calls

After evaluating several solutions we settled on Zoom for these reasons:

Dial-in and webinar modes
Functional on computers and mobile devices.
Good "crowd control" functionality: mute/unmute participants, have people raise hands, bring different people on for video, text chat.
Easy to archive calls for absent students to listen to later

Course enrollment and payment options

In switching from local, in person classes to an online course, Lisa needed an easy way to allow students to enroll in her course and to serve her protected course content to students in an intuitive manner.

The Beaver Builder WordPress plugin allows for quick and easy deployment of course sales pages, so each course can be effectively marketed without stress.
MemberPress manages course enrollment functionality and protects Lisa's course content, making it easy to follow a phased syllabus just like her local classes.
MemberPress seamlessly integrates with the Stripe payment gateway, allowing students to pay for her courses without leaving her website. Stripe also provides a powerful reporting engine and API hooks for future-proof development.
MemberPress provides Amazon Web Services integrations, so that Lisa's content can be securely served from the cost-effective AWS S3 system, whether her students are on desktop, laptop, tablet, or phone.

Lively multimedia course content, dripped weekly

Lisa needed to be able to provide a rich multimedia experience to her students in an easy-to-follow format.

The Beaver Builder WordPress plugin allows for quick and easy deployment of course sales pages, so each course can be effectively marketed without stress.
MemberPress protects Lisa's course content, dripping each week's worth of lessons according to a schedule for "just in time" learning. (Even better? The next time the course runs, Lisa will just need to increment the existing content control dates and she's ready to go again.)
MemberPress provides Amazon Web Services integrations, so that Lisa's content can be securely served from the cost-effective AWS S3 system, whether her students are on desktop, laptop, tablet, or phone.

Beaver Builder + MemberPress: lets Lisa drip content week by week

Videos bring far-flung students into the classroom.

Lisa says...

Lisa Weiner

I’ll take this opportunity to say that working with you has far surpassed my expectations; I honestly don’t feel like I can thank you enough for your: patience, clarity, knowledge, creativity and flexibility to name just a few of the things I have so appreciated. I started into this venture with a lot of anxiety and overwhelm and, with your support, have felt like I have learned so much and really grounded into the experience in a really powerful way! Thank you!