Ballet studios are generally fairly archaic in their management and administration practices. They rely on face-to-face communication, printed rolls, cash payments and scribbled post-it notes about student updates, costumes, fees and all the rest. At best they use a clunky and expensive piece of software, that only the receptionist knows how to use.
As a remote studio manager, I wanted to bring our ballet school into the 21st century. I was already working with Asana with all my other clients and thought I could adapt it easily to manage enrollments and invoicing for the studio. From here, the opportunities to use Asana in other areas of the business became immediately clear. We integrated Asana with Squarespace through an excel import to seamlessly manage online enrollment. We set up a Admin Office space that contains all the resources our Faculty and staff need day-to-day. We created projects and timelines for events and deliverables.
But this is by far my favourite project, because it took a bunch of creatives who HATE admin from being admin slugs to admin queens. This project is used as the template from which our Weekly Class projects are created. Here, teachers manage the rolls for their classes. They can also plan lessons, take notes, upload music and videos, and collaborate with other teachers. All they have to do is open the app on their phone, jump into their class and tick off their roll. This project kickstarted so much creative dialogue about lesson plans, students and choreography. It is also helping us manage our response to COVID-19 and potential transition to online classes.
I would love to know if anyone else is using Asana to manage creative studios and what you’ve found works well
This is great! I have a studio management software that manages my enrollments but I was looking to use Asana for lesson plans - can you share a little bit more about how you use it that way?
Hi Cassie, sorry for the slow response, I didn’t see the notification for this! I really like using Asana for the studios enrollment process as it means we can keep everything in one place.
Our enrollment form on the website (squarespace), saves to a google sheet which I then import into our Asana project for enrollments. Each student task populates automatically with all their enrollment details - see attached (the column that says Invoiced Term 1 is now Paid Term 1, as we now process payments through the website rather than by invoice). As classes are approved, parents pay, etc. we move their task through the columns. I use subtasks to track any other actions for that student - such as choregraphing solos. This is useful as the subtasks can then be added to other projects such as our Solos project.
