General Assembly: Expanding a Global Education Institution
– Background –
General Assembly is an educational institution with offices in London and New York City where entrepreneurs and startup professionals learn 21st century skills in technology, business and design from real-world practitioners. As the community has grown rapidly to include more than 240,000 people at 13 campuses worldwide, the variety and types of coursework have also expanded. Students can participate in full-time or part-time classroom courses, workshops, events, and online learning.
Challenges
The growing diversity and scale of General Assembly’s courses and events presented unique registration challenges. Moving into new countries requires the ability to accept payment in multiple currencies. Students can enrol in select portions or entire series of multi-session courses, adding complexity to the registration process. In addition, the popularity of certain courses and events has increased the importance of properly managing wait lists and check-in processes.
To provide a seamless registration experience for all of its students, General Assembly needed to:
- Enable students to enrol in flexible configurations of courses and events
- Collect payment in multiple currencies
- Easily manage wait lists
- Ensure accurate attendee check-in
– Solution –
Support for multi-session registration
Using Eventbrite, General Assembly was able to offer students a range of registration options for multi-session courses, whether it’s signing up for one part of a three-week workshop or the entire series. The ability to easily process a complex registration flow enables General Assembly to accurately collect payment and gain predictability around attendance in order to plan valuable classroom space accordingly.
Fast international integration
The agility of the Eventbrite platform has helped General Assembly’s expansion into new markets without having to make large investments in new registration systems. International payment options are already integrated into the platform, so when General Assembly moves into countries with different currencies, it can simply copy the registration processes that have already been created.
Easy wait list management
Popular events and classes sell out fast, so General Assembly relies on Eventbrite’s automated wait list functionality to set up wait lists and help registrars easily manage them. As General Assembly releases additional spaces, waitlistees get an email notification on how to enrol and how long they have to secure a spot, ensuring that no available spots are left unpurchased.
Accurate check-in
Making sure that the right people are allowed into classes and events is important for collecting correct payment as well as for space and security reasons. General Assembly uses Eventbrite to easily match attendees to their registration record.
“Eventbrite is a really agile platform that accommodates a fairly complicated ticket flow for multi-session classes, workshops and events. It gives people the option to sign up for just one session or multiple sessions within a course.”
— Anna Lindow
General Manager of Campus Education and Operations, General Assembly