Register Online for Private Lessons? Never say Never...

Music and Dance studios that have adopted online registration love the fact that they can fill classes without spending all their off-hours (or hiring admin staff) entering family, student and payment information in their record keeping systems.

But how can you make this work for private lesson registration? There are a number of challenges to registering private students online. For example:

• A private lesson is not usually pre-defined with a teacher, curriculum, specific time-slot and location. These are usually negotiated based on availability and student preferences.
• It is often important - for new students anyway - to match the age and ability of the student to a specific teacher.
• The student, or their caregiver, may really not know what is best for them!

So what is to be done? Just give up? Handle all private lesson registration on the phone as studios have done for decades?

Well I, for one, am not inclined to give up so easily.

Here is my view of the ideal online registration system for private lessons, and I really hope to get some comments and feedback so that we can make this a reality in our YourVirtuoso Features.

1. Create a simple, but powerful scheduling system that allows rooms and teachers to be made available for different types of lessons at different times
2. Let students/caregivers select the type of lesson they are looking for and see the availability.
3. Let students select a timeslot and teacher and enter all their contact and payment information, BUT put this under the control of you, the studio owner.
4. Have options for a registration process that you can select which range from, at one extreme, only allowing the student to express interest and asking for a consultation, to, at the other extreme, allowing them to book the timeslot and teacher online with notification to you, so you can adjust things if needed.

What do you think?

Let me know via comments here if you think this works, and especially if you have a better idea! We want YourVirtuoso to be the best studio management system available!