Portfolio- Case Study: Women In Business Education

Case Study: Women In Business Education

Lisa Leander is the Founder and CEO of Women in Business Education. She wanted to build a global community to champion women in business academia and bring together people looking to create diverse leadership and gender balance in business schools.

Some of the more interesting problems we solved together:

The WiBE Membership site had to allow Lisa to curate her membership list-- she needed to be able to approve members after they applied, but before being accepted.
Lisa was already hosting successful Zoom webinars and needed to be able to integrate those webinars into a per-Membership event calendar.
The course needed to be mobile-friendly and open 24/7, to allow busy academics to join anywhere, anytime. Archived webinars allow members to view when it's convenient for them.
Lisa needed to launch quickly and grow her membership in the future. Paid Memberships Pro and Memberoni allowed a rapid-fire 10-day development schedule, leaving much of the content to be built after the membership was cash-flow positive.

Responsive Design

A membership site for busy academics needs to be accessible anytime and anywhere-- which means it needs to be mobile responsive.

Solution: Memberoni Theme and CSS Hero plugin

Lisa is a member of The Membership Academy, and we decided to use their bespoke membership theme, Memberoni, which allowed a fast development timeline and simple, effective user interface. When we needed to enhance the interface, we used CSS Hero to allow easy, creative style upgrades.

Managing a Busy Webinar Schedule

Lisa already had a successful series of online webinars and social events. She needed to be able to convert these webinars to membership events to control access once her membership launched.

Solution: Live Webinars via Zoom

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 members to listen to later

Solution: Events Manager with Zoom Add-on

The Events Manager plugin allowed us to customize her event calendar and make sure that the right group of members had access to "their" events and no others. It also supported Zoom integration, so people could RSVP to the event and sign up for Zoom in one step.

Creating New Course Content

Lisa needed to be able to convert her webinars to courses and workshops and allow members perpetual access.

Solution: Turn Zoom Webinars into Archived Courses

One of the most effective way to build membership site content is to convert live webinars to workshops or courses after the fact. Memberoni and Vimeo allow Lisa to quickly and easily convert her Zoom webinars to online workshops and allow controlled perpetual access to the content.

Membership enrollment and payment options

Lisa is launching an exclusive professional membership, so she needed a way to approve members and control access. She also needed to process payments seamlessly and to build out her memberships as the site grows.

Paid Memberships Pro has a membership approval add-on, which lets her pre-approve members so the right people end up in the right membership. She can also set up pre-vetted email addresses to let a group of members into the system bypassing the approval process altogether.
Paid Memberships Pro seamlessly integrates with the Stripe payment gateway, allowing members to pay for her memberships without leaving her website. Stripe also provides a powerful reporting engine and API hooks for future-proof development.

Lisa says...

I used Reidy Brown to launch my new membership site and I couldn't have picked a better partner. From day one she gave exceptional advice on strategy and based on her recommendations I landed up changing from my original tech tools to ones that would better meet the needs of my audience. She knows her stuff when it comes to memberships. She has extraordinary patience as she fine tuned every detail and she well researched any bugs that popped up in the code with an immediate answer or result. Day or night Reidy responded to urgent requests and we were able to launch in about 10 days from start to finish. I have a beautiful site that will grow along with the membership. I highly recommend Reidy.