Challenge
PSHE Association, a leading educational platform, sought to enhance its membership offering by introducing a new tier: School Plus on top of existing individual, School Memberships and group tiers. School Plus' purpose is to give users a new dynamic learning experience, to support the training needs of both new and experienced PSHE educators.
The goal was to provide users with an exclusive membership option that delivered added benefits, while also ensuring internal teams had the tools to manage and track user progress effectively. A key focus was to allow flexible management for all users - PSHE Association team managers and members. The challenge lay in building a seamless user flow between integrations for new and existing members, enabling frictionless account upgrades, and integrating multiple payment systems for a variety of transaction methods.
In addition, the platform’s existing admin dashboards lacked necessary functionality to track progress, provide reporting and manage data. PSHE Association needed a solution that would provide insights into member engagement and completion rates and give all membership tiers a path to upgrade to School Plus. Our role was to design and develop a solution that not only met these needs but also ensured scalability and usability for PSHE, team members and members.
Solution
To address the challenge, we began by focusing on the user flow. We designed a new membership structure that included the School Plus tier, positioned as an exclusive option for users looking for additional benefits. New and upgrading users would now encounter an additional step in the flow where they could choose between the standard School membership and the new School Plus tier, ensuring a smooth transition for both new sign-ups and existing members.
On the technical side, we enhanced existing payment systems Stripe and Xero - each tailored to support the new membership structure. Hubspot was used to manage membership data, ensuring PSHE Association could track user progress and facilitate auto-renewals. Stripe supported the billing system for School Plus members, with added features like pro rata for mid-term upgrades. Meanwhile, Xero was used to track financial details and create custom reporting for membership changes. TalentLMS is a white label e-learning platform we developed and extended to create the sense of one, uniformed platform.
We redesigned the admin dashboard to streamline user tracking, allowing internal teams to monitor course completions and user progress more effectively. This gives team managers insight on team progress so they can encourage engagement. This functionality was built on industry best practices to ensure that PSHE Association’s teams had easy access to critical data.
Our approach was highly collaborative, involving close communication with the PSHE Association team throughout the process. PSHE Associations’s in-depth knowledge of Hubspot and their use of the CRM proved critical in delivering robust and extensible future opportunities.
We continuously tested the system to ensure accuracy and reliability, including conducting regression testing on the payment integrations. The phased launch allowed for smooth rollouts meaning any adjustments could be made based on real-world feedback, enabling us to pivot when dealing with uncertainty and efficiently deploying changes.
Impact
The new School Plus tier not only expanded the PSHE Association's product offering but also improved user experience by making it easier for members to upgrade and access premium content. The integration of Hubspot, Stripe, and Xero streamlined financial processes, allowing the client to track memberships, manage payments, and grant access to exclusive resources with ease.
To date, there are 525 members on the Schools Plus tier, creating a new income stream for the organisation without impacting standard memberships. In addition, the implementation of a new auto-renewal system has seen renewals go from 35-40% of memberships to 70% - a 75-100% increase in renewals.
We recently worked with Manifesto on launching our new School Plus membership tier, which required integrating our LMS platform with our CRM, creating a pro-rata upgrade system, and building a dynamic dashboard that pulls information from the LMS to our website. From start to finish, they were highly communicative, quick to respond to questions, and proactive in keeping the project moving forward. What stood out most was their flexibility and problem-solving: whenever challenges arose, they approached them with practical solutions and found work-arounds to ensure we achieved the outcome needed.
Sofia GelnerDigital Product Owner, PSHE Association