Time to Vote!

SimplySignUp is looking to make YourVirtuoso not only the best deal in studio administration, but also the most complete and relevant suite of services available.

To this end we want to hear from YOU. 

Please go to our User Voice website and browse the list of features you and your peers have suggested on this blog or on the feedback site.

Once you have looked them over create an account and make your own suggestions, comment on others, and VOTE! 

Several new features have already been added. More to come - based on your feedback...

Make sure your voice is heard!

Gerry

Sending Names for the KI Loyalty Survey

If you want to participate in the KI loyalty survey, here are the steps to create a file to send to KI.

Thanks to Kathy Morrison for helping prepare this...

1. Login to YourVirtuoso
   
2. Click on “Reporting” in the top right hand corner and choose “Custom Reporting” at the bottom of the drop-down menu.
   
3. Click on the “Create a Family Report” link.
   
4. On the next screen, click on “Select Families by Enrollment”
   
5. From the next pop-up window, choose the first option to select “has a child enrolled in” anything during “Fall 2008” session. You must choose your “Fall 2008” session from the drop-down list.
   
6. Click OK on the pop-up window, then click Done on the YourVirtuoso screen. This will take you to the next screen.
   
7. Click “Edit Columns” on the next screen which says “Custom Family Report: New Report”
   
8. The next screen provides a list of possible report columns. Click on the “x” to delete the extra columns. Be sure to keep: Family Name, Caregiver Name, Caregiver Email Address. When finished deleting the extra columns, click OK at the bottom of the pop-up window.
9. Click “Generate Report” to see the list of families enrolled in Fall 2008 session.
10. Click on “CSV” link at the bottom of the screen to create an excel spreadsheet on your desktop.
    
11. Once saved, open this file up (excel works best) and review the data for accuracy. If any family has not submitted an email address, then the family should be deleted from this file.
    
12. Add column for your educator number and add to each row in the list. (Note that if you have multiple educators, you can pick them one by one in step 5 and repeat the process)
    
13. Add a title at the top of the file that includes Educator Name, Semester (ie Fall 2008), Semester Start and End Dates
    
14. Save these changes and close the file.
    
15. Email this .csv file to Kindermusik International
    

Birthday Lists, Labels etc

You have always been able to create a Mailing Label report just for students with a certain birth month, but now you have some more flexible options using Custom Reports.

1. Select the Reports/Custom Reports menu
2. Create a new family report
   
3. Use the "Select Families using Child information" and pick a birthday range you want
4. Use the same selector again if you want other criteria like age...
5. Click Done to get back to report page
6. Click Edit Columns and add or delete the columns you want on your report. Children DoB gives "7/21/08", Children Birthdays shows "July 21st"
7. Click Generate Report to see the preview
8. Use one of the report options at the bottom to get a printable version, or CSV to download the information so you can use it in word or excel, as a mail merge for example.

Once you get used to custom reports, there are all sorts of uses. Let us know if you have a good one to share!

How do I Archive My data?

To create an archive of your data, you need to create two custom reports.

Under custom reporting, create a new prospect report and select all prospects, then add all available columns to your report and click "generate". If the report looks correct, use the "CSV" button to export it to a file that you can open in excel or import into other programs.

Then do the same with a new family report (some of the columns are redundant, but you can export them all anyway).

The family data will include their balance information, but if you want specific payment and/or enrollment information, you might want to create a payment report or statements for all your families and use the PDF button which will let you save the reports to refer to later.

YourVirtuoso and Kindermusik Q & A

The Bottom Line
The original agreement between Kindermusik and SimplySignUp expires in July, but YourVirtuoso will continue to be available, supported and enhanced. The team at SimplySignUp (SSU) is happy to be taking over full responsibility for supporting the service which they defined, designed, and manage today.

Who is SSU?
SSU was formed in 2004 by Gerry Cobley and a Raleigh NC based software design company to address the need for a web-based application serving music studios, dance studios, etc.
Gerry's 15 years administering Julia's large (top 1% Maestro) Kindermusik studio provided the detailed knowledge which, along with with his MBA, business experience with Gartner and his partners' business application and web design expertise combined to create the critical mass needed to develop YourVirtuoso.
SSU has no other investors, and developed YV without any outside funding (not even from KI).

Why is the Agreement Expiring?
SSU and KI hoped that YourVirtuoso would eventually benefit virtually all Kindermusik educators. For this reason, KI elected to make it mandatory for new licensees. What we (SSU) have learned is that there are a very large number of educators who have such small enrollment (10 or 20 students) and no burning desire to grow, that even the $14.95 and the couple of hours to set YV up were beyond their needs. KI plans to address this with their new Class locator based system, and while we provided a proposal to have this interwork with YV and use existing YV capabilities, KI have elected to build it on their own.

What is changing in July?
As a subscriber to YV, very little will change about the service itself. The service has always been owned and managed by SimplySignUp (SSU) and in July the only significant change we expect will be that SSU will take over customer support from KI. The end-user license agreement you accepted when you registered for YV was between you and SSU and is not affected (though we may clarify your full ownership of your data, and ask you to affirm that you are a licensed KM educator who can use the KI logos in your website).

What About the Future of YV?
From the SSU perspective, we are a small but viable corporation focussed on providing a fully integrated, fully featured suite of studio administration and internet marketing tools. This remains our vision, and we have no intention to pull the plug on YourVirtuoso.
We have no plans to increase the subscription price for YV, including YV 2.0 at this time.
KI has no desire to deny you access to KI curriculum information, and we will put a process in place to promptly update curriculum information when necessary.

We will, however, be free to add features based on your needs, not constrained by KI's priorities, and we will putting a process in place to capture your priorities.
We cannot speak to the specifics of which YV features will and wont be duplicated by KI on Kindermusik.com, but our expectation is that educators with significant enrollment, non- Kindermusik curricula, reporting and tracking needs, or concerns over KI ownership of their customer data will find YV the best, if not the only, option. Only time will tell, so we recommend you wait and see.


Should I Let Kindermusik Have an Archive of my Data?
Here are a few facts and one opinion for you to consider:

1. SSU uses a professional, secure hosting company and data is backed up by us every 30 minutes, and transferred to tapes for offsite storage every day.
   
2. In YV 2.0 you can create complete reports for customers and prospects, and export those to "CSV" files which can be stored on your computer and read by excel, word etc.
   
3. SSU has not been informed of how the data would be used by Kindermusik
   

... and the opinion... Your customer list is the crown jewel of your business. Be very careful how you share it. My advice is not to share it at all - whenever KI sends an email (like Tune In) to your prospects, selling old DRMY inventory for example, with no mention of kindermusik classes, it devalues the Kindermusik brand from the educational values you have spent years promoting. ...end of opinion...

SSU is committed to supporting you, and protecting your valuable customer data.

Customers Who Don't Need Materials

For your own custom curricula, and (very rarely) for Kindermusik curricula you sometimes have students who don't need materials (enroll very late in session for example). You can certainly just  modify the charges to $0, but the materials package will still be counted on your "Materials Needed" report.

The best way to handle this is to add a new materials package to the units/curricula you use. Add it in curriculum setup before you create the classes. You can call it "Other" or "None Required", but it will be shown on the public website as a materials option, so you may want to be careful how you describe it. I have put something like "Please contact us if you have unique needs for materials".

Once this is in place, when you have a student who does not get any of the standard packages, you can just "modify" the default materials in their AR page and select this package in the drop down selector, making appropriate notes or pricing changes at the same time. This will take them out of the counts used in your materials report (and show them under "Other").

Remember, for Kindermusik Curricula you are bound by your licensing agreement, so one of the standard materials packages is almost always required...

Gerry

ABC on YourVirtuoso

We are often asked about ABC Music & Me, and how to handle it in YV. There are many ways to approach it, and I would encourage comments on this blog with any of your creative ideas.
First of all, why can it be a problem? Here are a few important differences from the other KI curricula for which YV is currently optimised. They all stem from the fact that ABC is structured in 4 week units:

1. Signing up continuing students every month can be a burden
2. There is no set session start and end if you run an ongoing program where students join and drop at will
3. Long sessions with multiple months show the entire cost, and may cause "sticker shock"
4. Classes at Daycares are usually restricted to children attending the daycare

We have some plans to change the way sessions and pricing are handled to make this much simpler, but these will not be available until after YourVirtuoso 2.0, so here is one option we came up with to handle a daycare ABC program with rolling monthly enrollment:

1. Set up a new session for the classes starting when your program starts and ending at some logical point in the distant future such as the end of the school year. DO NOT ACTIVATE this session so that will not appear on your website.
2. Set up the ABC classes in this session picking all the units that you will teach over this extended period. If you charge $50 per month, split as $15 materials and $35 tuition, set the materials packages to $15 incl tax (if you do it in the curriculum, you wont have to do it for each class you add), and set the tuition to be $35 * the number of units you will teach over this period (e.g if your session was 9 months long, set the tuition to $315). Set up a pricing plan to take $50 deposit and spread the balance over the session in monthly payments. Test enroll someone to check that it sets the monthly fees to $50, and adjust dates to make it work if not. You can activate these classes (not the session).
3. In your currently active session (eg Fall 07) set up an ABC class for the unit you are about to start with the appropriate start and end dates etc. Price it at $35, materials $15. Activate it and it will appear online for parents to register in. Market to/through the daycare asking parents to sign up online for this class and store their credit cards, and let them know they will stay enrolled until they advise you they want to drop.
4. When the enrollment period for this months class is over, mark it completed, remove the students from this class (creating a credit) and add them to the ongoing class. Make a payment to apply their $50 credit to the first (deposit) on the ongoing class.
5. You now have these students all set for the rest of the year. If they drop out, modify their tuition (was $315) to what they actually took, and modify the materials that they will not be getting to $0 (ideally set up a dummy "no materials" package for this curriculum so your materials report counts them correctly)
6. For new students, add a class(es) in your current session every month for the current unit, and set the class size to be the spaces you have left. At the end of the enrollment period, move them to the ongoing class as before, but adjust tuition and materials to reflect their late start in the session.

As I said, we are working on simplifying this process! In the mean time do you have a better way of handling it anyone?

Gerry