Starstruck: From Dance-School Website to Business Platform

Key outcomes

• Around £5,000 a year in third-party platform charges no longer paid
• Top-five local visibility on Google for multiple dance-class searches around Solihull
• One platform for the website, enrolment, invoicing, payments, parents, tutors, the shop and events

Three connected challenges

Starstruck is a successful school with a loyal community of families. Its digital presence simply hadn't kept pace.

• Brand. The previous website didn't reflect the quality and professionalism of the school.
• Finding new families. Solihull is a competitive market, and families searching for a particular dance style needed to find Starstruck.
• Operations. Class management and payments ran on a third-party platform whose recurring charges had grown to around £5,000 a year.

Looking beyond the website

We looked at how the school operates day to day: how a child joins a class, how fees are worked out, how teachers take registers and how the school talks to parents. For many schools, off-the-shelf software is the right choice. For Starstruck, the recurring cost had become large enough to justify software built around the way it already works.

What we built

• Billing that understands terms. Children who join or leave partway through a term are charged for the sessions they actually attend, worked out automatically.
• Term management. A new term is cloned from the last one, with one invoice per family raised in a single action.
• Payments, however families pay. Parents can pay online by card, and staff record childcare vouchers, tax-free childcare, cash and bank payments, so the balance is always right.
• A parent portal. Parents can see classes, invoices, payments and balances, and join a waiting list when a class is full.
• Digital registers. Tutors see only their own classes, and attendance reaches management straight away.
• Targeted emails. The school can email parents by class, venue or primary school, instead of every parent getting every message.
• Local search built in. Each discipline has its own page, showing the live timetable straight from the platform.
• A shop and event tickets. Uniforms, merchandise and show tickets sell through Starstruck's own site.

Moving without starting again

Every family moved across from the old platform with their details intact, and siblings were grouped into one family account. Parents were then invited to set up their portal login.

Could this work for your business?

None of this is specific to dance schools. The same thinking applies to training providers, sports clubs, gyms, membership organisations, event operators and any business paying for several disconnected platforms.