Finalsite Training webinars

About Finalsite

Better tools. Stronger schools.

Finalsite is a software-as-a-service company that provides communications and content management solutions to educational institutions, particularly focused on K12 schools. In addition to their flagship content management system, Composer, Finalsite offers modules to help schools manage: calendars, forms, contacts, athletics, bulk email and text messaging, files, social media feeds, news and blogging, mobile apps, and more. While sites are designed and built internally with customized templates, and some content migration services may be included, clients are expected to use Finalsite’s tools independently after site launch.

Over the course of 7 years, and a period of explosive growth for the company, I worked to build scalable onboarding and product training opportunities for clients as well as Finalsite employees. From knowledge base articles and blog posts to recorded webinars and interactive video-based courses, I designed empowering learning experiences that helped multiple types of users make the most of their Finalsite tools.

Know your audience

Finalsite’s broad user base presented unique challenges for creating educational content to address their needs. A Finalsite user may be anyone from a teacher with no technical background building a form during her free period to a district IT administrator implementing sites for dozens of elementary, middle, and high schools. Finalsite’s granular user permissions allowed even parents and students to access Composer or any of its modules. Users’ needs varied widely depending on where they were in their journey, whether launching a new site, updating an existing one, or (often) taking over a site from a previous admin who didn’t leave adequate handover instructions. As a SaaS, Finalsite also released new features regularly (on a two-week agile cycle) that required additional training for even the most seasoned admins.

To ensure we were catering to our clients’ needs, whatever their background, I created three levels of user personas: User, Admin, and Superadmin. A User was someone who was creating content or using a module for its intended purpose, such as publishing a news article, sending a message, or building a form. They would almost never need to change the configuration settings for a module, which is where the Admin role comes in. Superadmin encompasses users still in the initial design (or redesign) phase and preparing for site launch, as well as district admins whose actions may impact multiple Composer instances. These roles are fluid, and a Superadmin may function as an Admin or even User the majority of the time.

Training in real time

While the interactive courses formed the core of our onboarding learning paths, our recorded webinars series served as a valuable supplemental resource, affording clients the ability to ask questions if they attended live, a deeper dive into specific topics, timely overviews of new features, or even a friendly face and a casual approach to the topic. Webinars were hosted by one or more members of the Client Education team, including myself, with occasional guest hosts from the Product or Support departments for special topics.

The one-hour webinar format can be challenging for the presenter who spends an hour talking to a wall, and also in terms of information overload. We brainstormed ideas as a group to keep the content focused and engage users, and we preferred to use both a slide deck and live demonstrations to help orient learners who, let’s face it, are most likely listening to the presentation in the background of actual work. Before I uploaded recordings to the LMS, I processed each video, added title cards and transitions, and made occasional edits for bits that didn’t need to be preserved for history. I also spot-checked the generated transcript for errors, such as the company name always being recorded as “final site.”

We made other opportunities for instructor-led training available to clients, as well, from the two-day bootcamp Finalsite Prep to freeform Study Group sessions where up to five clients a day could join and have their questions addressed in real time, whether it was an impromptu overview of a specific feature or troubleshooting errors on a client’s page while they watched. Clients enjoyed these sessions so much that they often joined without a specific question, just to learn from the group.