Elevating the enrollment and onboarding experience
Overview
At What’s Good Studio, we’ve been partnering with Modern Elder Academy (MEA) since 2019 to grow their reach through website design and customized web app solutions. Starting from a single campus in Baja Mexico, MEA has since expanded to new locations in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Our partnership has been pivotal in supporting this growth and ensuring seamless operations at scale.
Info
Challenge
MEA’s unique hybrid business model—one part educational workshop provider and one part high-end hotel—required a tailored guest management system. MEA's guests needed to travel and prepare for their workshops, which meant the organization relied heavily on manual email communications and a cumbersome system of spreadsheets to collect and provide information. This process was overwhelming for both guests and staff, and important information was sometimes missed. No off-the-shelf software met MEA’s specific needs.
MEA required a scalable solution to enroll, onboard, and manage guests across nearly 100 workshops per year at three campuses. The solution needed to seamlessly integrate the property management system (PMS) MEWS, which was designed for nightly bookings rather than workshops, with the customer relationship management (CRM) system HubSpot. This integration needed to simplify the process for potential customers and enrolled guests while reducing operational pressure on the MEA team.
Our solution
We partnered with MEA to develop a custom web app to easily enroll and onboard a growing number of students.
Increased customer satisfaction
The custom app allows guests to easily select, enroll and pay for their workshop. It also offers a streamlined onboarding process to gather essential information, such as travel and dietary preferences, while providing guests with important details about the workshop and travel destination.
Streamline business operations
We integrated MEWS PMS with HubSpot CRM using custom APIs, allowing for real-time booking and financial data synchronization. This integration improved coordination between various tools and enhanced overall operational efficiency.
About the client
MEA empowers individuals in their 40s, 50s, and beyond to embrace life transitions like divorce, career changes, and empty nesting with renewed purpose. Their curriculum encourages creativity, play, and self-discovery, helping students explore new hobbies, rekindle old passions, and define their legacy. MEA fosters a community where modern elders reject outdated narratives, embracing the second half of life with curiosity, wisdom, and a spirit of adventure, all while forging deep connections and lifelong growth.
The Work
The What’s Good team worked closely with MEA to integrate feedback from various departments, including admissions, sales, and hospitality, in order to achieve a seamless end product. Our development focused on 3 main components:
Direct Enrollment and Payment Integration
MEA relied on 3rd party tools to collect payments at initial enrollment and prior to the workshop. We integrated the MEWS PMS (Property Management System) to support MEA’s unique hybrid model. Now, guests can easily pay their deposit and have their second payment be automatically charged, reducing the need for extra emails.
Step-by-step onboarding process
Guests now go through a clear, step-by-step onboarding process upon enrollment. This approach ensures MEA collects all necessary information from guests while providing users with easy access to all relevant details.
Unified Guest Portal
We customized the MEWS PMS (Property Management System) to support MEA’s unique hybrid model. Now, guests can easily pay their deposit and have their second payment be automatically charged, reducing the need for extra emails.
The newly implemented system significantly supports MEA’s growth, enabling them to manage a higher volume of enrollments efficiently with the same team size. The seamless enrollment and onboarding process greatly improved guest satisfaction.
Moreover, the solution provides a robust foundation for adapting to future requirements, eliminates the creation of additional tech silos, and supports a scalable and integrated tech ecosystem.
Post-launch of the Santa Fe campus, enrollments surged from an average of 60 to 150 per month without increasing the size or workload of the operations team.
Despite this rise in bookings, support requests fell by 80% due to our proactive data synchronization between MEWS and HubSpot.
We provided comprehensive training and created Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) to eliminate the need for frequent support calls and allow the team to manage issues asynchronously.
Chip Conley
Modern Elder Academy (MEA) founder and New York Times bestselling author