onCourse in Action

A star is born. Act Accordingly. Ready for your closeup.

You don’t have to be Cate Blanchett or Sam Worthington (both NIDA alums) to get into the premier acting school’s classes.

The problem

NIDA were rebuilding their website assets from the ground up with goals of better presenting their short course offering and creating a more integrated and easier to use enrolment process.

They had engaged a web company to build these websites, but there was a huge challenge in bolting together a sophisticated search engine to a ecommerce engine which understood not just “products” but courses, schedules and other education concepts.

NIDA admin staff were spending valuable time fielding phone calls from prospective students during peak business hours. There was also a need to manually input enrolment data from one software management system to another, resulting in errors and duplications.

The solution

onCourse was rolled out over a very short timeframe in just a few weeks, meeting the existing project deadlines. Over the next few years a complete website and brand redesign were rolled out, and NIDA commissioned some important enhancements to onCourse in order to meet business requirements.

  • Faceted search to make it easier for students to search across 500 product offerings, including showing pre-counts to avoid users making choices leading to no results.
  • More sophisticated location searching to handle NIDA’s geographically diverse offerings
  • Live integration with the Tessitura CRM (a product similar to SalesForce)

And of course a student management and ecommerce engine.

A current, constantly updated website was created, allowing students to browse accurate information 24/7. Enrolment information was pushed from onCourse to Tessitura via an API, ensuring that any changes that are made in onCourse will automatically update in Tessitura. Relationships between contacts are also included, along with their enrolment data, qualifications, invoice information and waiting list details. Users are notified immediately about any mistakes.

The result

The number of repetitive calls to NIDA staff were significantly reduced. And with only one point of data entry, information is transferred between programs and websites seamlessly and accurately. Staff were able to better manage their time and complete tasks quickly and efficiently.

NIDA continues to grow its short course and corporate offerings dramatically, without increasing administration costs and staffing. Their website is regularly cited as a leading example of its type.