Running a learning center is hard. With shoestring budgets, a part-time workforce, and excel skills a pre-requisite, you wear many hats.

This series of posts is designed to help. The key to thriving within these constraints, I believe, is analytical thinking. In the following content pieces, I will propose a data-driven framework for running a learning center. This will aid in identifying key areas of improvement to improve your center.

Why listen to me? I’m Ben, the CEO of a startup called Penji that helps college learning centers expand their impact. We’ve worked with 300+ learning centers to date, from every type of college imaginable. In this and future articles, I will work to package those experiences into a “master plan” for learning centers.

In this video and article, we break down a 3-part framework for measuring and improving your center over time.

Analytical Thinking at Learning Centers

A “funnel” is a useful concept from the business world. A funnel gets smaller as you go from top to bottom, and is an analogy for the journey your users take as they utilize your services.

You start with the full population - in our case, all students on campus. Your goal is to take someone from the top of the funnel to the bottom of the funnel.

In the learning center context, students must:

1. Hear about you (Awareness)
2. Try a first session (Activation)
3. Come back for more (Re-Engagement)

For each step in the funnel, there is a conversion rate. In simple terms, conversion rates are the % of people that make it from one step to the next. For example, many people may be Aware of a service, but only some % of those will move on to trying that service for a first engagement. Our goal is to improve conversion rates.

Notice how the numbers shrink as you go down. Our jobs as managers are to minimize the fall off from one step to enough, or said another way, maximize the conversion rate between steps.

For each funnel step, we will want to (1) measure how we are doing and (2) work on improving that metric over time. As you begin to measure these metrics, it becomes useful to compare your center's metrics to other similar centers. That's why we prepared the report linked here:

Step 1: Awareness

Measuring awareness is actually the most challenging of the three steps. Instead of trying to understand how many students know you exist, most centers track what is in their control, and that is marketing.

Three methods to measure your marketing, from simplest to most complex:

• How many marketing channels did you use this semester?
  ‍For example: orientation drive, classroom visits, and department newsletters. That’s 3 channels. Can you add a fourth this term?
• How many total marketing activities did you do across your channels?
  ‍More complex, but useful. For example: one orientation drive, 23 classroom visits, 4 department newsletters. Now you can also work on the total volume within each channel.
• How many touchpoints did you have with students?
  ‍The most complex. A touchpoint represents a distinct contact with a student. You will have multiple touchpoints per student. For example: 500 touchpoints at orientation, 50 touchpoints across 23 class visits for 1,150 touchpoints, and 250 touchpoints across 4 newsletters for 1,000 touchpoints. This is 2,650 touchpoints in total.

Step 2: Activation

This step is about reducing friction to booking a session and making your services seem worthwhile. A few ways you can work on this:

• Offering the right mix of courses, hours, and modalities
• Offering a mobile-friendly scheduling experience (Penji can help)
• Sharing data on overage GPA of your users vs. general population
• Working to show “social proof”, e.g. sharing images of your busy center

The metric we will track for this step (check out the funnel graphic again, above):

1. Unique students
2. Percentage of campus that has used your services (our “conversion rate” for this step)

Step 3: Re-Engagement

This final step occurs when students have a great experience and want to come back for more. This is controllable through:

1. Excellent tutor hiring and training practices
2. Regular feedback loop to help tutors and your center improve
3. Offering multiple modalities, like a finals group review session\

Improve “Conversions” from Step to Step

So how can we improve our conversion rates? Simply tracking a metric for each funnel step is a great start. Check out this sample spreadsheet for how this will look:
‍

Tracking these metrics term-to-term will give you a sense of which metric you’d like to work on improving next, and reveal interesting trends and deviations.

Once you begin measuring in a regular way, you’ll want to know how you can improve these metrics. Here are some of the upcoming playbooks we will share:‍

Awareness Playbooks

• A step-by-step process for tracking your marketing touchpoints each term
• The seven most common marketing channels at learning centers and how you can deploy them

‍Activation Playbooks

• A guide to optimizing the tutor schedules and courses offered at your center
• Insights on your mobile-facing scheduling workflow (40% of sessions are booked via phone!)

Re-Engagement Playbooks

• Real examples of post-session feedback forms and processes
• Tutor training processes, what other centers are doing

Recommended Process

1. Select your key metrics (or use ours, shared in the spreadsheet above)
2. Hold regular meetings to review your metrics - copy this template spreadsheet for your own usage
3. Deploy playbooks of your choosing each term to try and improve
4. At the end of the term, review the data to see what worked and what didn’t
5. Repeat this process

While it may seem like a lot, this process will feel easy as you settle into it.

The benefit? You will become increasingly clear on what your priorities should at any given time. This clarity is very nice!

Wrapping Up

Simply recording and reviewing this data will help a lot. A famous quote that holds true here:

That which is measured improves

You’ll find yourself having more ideas just with the simple act of observing your data over time. Future posts will dive into each metric, each funnel step, and give you how-to- guides on how to work on improving that step.

Would love to hear feedback on this piece! Email me at ben.h@penjiapp.com.

Ben Holmquist
CEO, Penji
ben.h@penjiapp.com