Over the past few months we’ve continued to work hard on finishing off development of brand new features, plus enhancement to current functionality. With all the work done recently, the upcoming releases will see some major changes and improvements roll out – so stay tuned for more. Here is a snapshot of what we’ve been working on and what’s to come.
Major Update
We have been working on a major upgrade to how the Feesable app is deployed on your website, and we are excited to let you know that we have now rolled this out! This upgrade brings a number of improvements and changes which impact how the Fee Calculator displays and functions on your site, so please read on for more details.
Note: we are in the process of fine-tuning and resolving a few known issues surrounding this release, and as part of this we welcome your feedback - so please reach out if you have any questions of feedback.
Student Information
We have made adjustments to the flow of how the student information is gathered which will make the process easier for parents to understand and deliver better data for schools. The main change being that the Year Group and Calendar year fields now respond to whether the child is a new student or current:
New Contact Flow
This update will mean a more streamlined experience for the user, and more options for schools. The default contact preference question has been updated to deliver the optimal experience for the user. The contact preference option is also now before the contact form, and the form fields now respond based on the users choice:
The goal of these changes is to deliver an even better experience and provide more choice for families. So as part of these changes, we encourage you to consider how your contact form is setup. Here are our recommendations:
- Review the default question text – this text has been carefully crafted for the best experience, however it can be customised to your liking.
- Review the default choices – there are now 2 default options, essentially ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to being contacted – a simple choice of only 2 options really helps to streamline the process. The text in these options can be customised, and if desired, more options can be added.
- Review required fields – We believe if a family is genuinely interested in your school they will request to be contacted, meaning that you will receive high quality enquiries from genuinely interested families.
- If a parent chooses the option “I would like to learn more…” – we recommend the Name and Email fields are set to required, and Phone optional.
- If a parent chooses the option “I am just researching, so please don’t follow up at this time” – we recommend that the Name, Email and Phone fields are not required. This will mean the school will not receive the fee enquiry (email), however it does remove a potential barrier for a family seeking to learn more about your school. (Note: the data for these submissions will be available in the soon to be released Admin Portal, so you can still access and analyse these submissions for general conversion tracking and usage of the calculator).
- We recommend that Postcode should be required for all options as this allows you to gather useful geographical data and is a low barrier for users.
- If desired, you can choose to make any or all of the contact fields required in all cases, meaning you will gain the enquiry data for all submissions.
Please contact [email protected] if you wish to discuss or make changes to any of the above options – your feedback is always welcome!
New Embed method
We won’t bore you with technical details, but this new embed method makes the Feesable app more efficient and dynamic within a school website. One practical benefit is that the app will now dynamically adjust height, meaning no ‘internal scrolling’ or redundant white space below the app.
For current customers, to upgrade to this new embed method requires a change to the embed code on your school website – we will be in touch with you with the instructions to update soon.
Open the Floodgates
This major release has opened the way to release multiple new features and updates across the product including the ability to add payment information, improved forecasting, improved integrations, WordPress plugin and more – stay tuned for more information on these upcoming releases.
Administration Portal
Development of the Feesable Admin Portal is well underway and we hope to bring you further updates on this exciting release in early 2023. Find a few more details in the last update.
And beyond…
We have many other new features under development and on the roadmap – here are a few highlights of what is to come in 2023 and beyond…
- Email Digests – we are working on creating an email digest feature which will allow you to receive daily, weekly or monthly ‘digests’ of your fee enquiries.
- Parent Survey Features – we are working towards this value-add feature which will allow a school to ask simple follow up questions such as sentiment towards your fees or other important enrolment touch points.
- Detailed Reporting – the dashboard will allow for reporting of various data points from your fee calculator and parent surveys which will help you to make better decisions about your enrolment strategies.
- Key Integrations – connecting key systems in your edtech stack to Feesable will unlock some valuable solutions and process efficiencies.
- and more to come…
===
Thanks for reading! If you have any feature requests, or even ideas to discuss, we are always keen to listen – so please get in touch.