How We Help Colleges Transition to Digital Catalog Software
August 6, 2018
Many of the colleges we talk to know that moving their course catalog to a digital solution like Clean Catalog will be an all-around win for their institution — they'll save time building the catalog, they'll provide an accessible product to their community, and they'll notch some marketing wins.
The tricky part, though, is in the transition — catalogs affect almost every area of the college, and transitioning to a new way of doing things can seem daunting. At Clean Catalog, we've learned that how we support colleges in their transition to a digital catalog is just as important as the top-notch product we're providing.
Here are a few of the key ways we work with colleges to help them transition to our digital catalog software.
We Build Out the Initial Catalog for Colleges
With every college we work with, we use their existing print catalog to build out their initial digital catalog, instead of having them start with a blank catalog they have to fill in. That saves them at ton of time and data entry — and it helps them quickly see how things work in our system.
Plus, we're really good at importing catalogs — we have all sorts of automation and tricks to take even the largest PDFs and elegantly import them into our software.
We Consistently Work With Colleges to Fine Tune Their Experience
Our software is extremely flexible and customizable — if there's something you're trying to accomplish, odds are we can handle it. As colleges dive into using Clean Catalog, we work with them to get everything working just right, whether it's a small front-end spacing issue or the wording of a button on the back end.
This isn't something that happens just during the launch process. Even years after launch, we're constantly checking in with our customers to see if there are ways we can improve their Clean Catalog experience, and we adjust accordingly.
We Provide Ongoing Training
Because our software is generally easy and intuitive to use, we don't require hours and hours of training. Generally, we give a brief overview so people can get into the system to kick the tires, and then we do a 30-minute or so training to go over any questions they have. We repeat this as needed.
We've found that this system — providing training as needed as users get familiar with Clean Catalog — is the best way for getting users of all technical abilities trained on Clean Catalog. Rather than providing a 3-hour training at the onset and leaving people to their own devices, we hop on screen shares as needed and help people figure out anything that might be giving them trouble.
We Love Getting Feature Requests
We love getting feature requests — it's how we consistently improve and expand our software to better meet the needs of colleges and universities. That's how we created our recent PDF feature — a couple of colleges we worked with had requested similar functionality, and we worked with them to build out exactly what they needed.
When colleges say, "is it possible to do ______?" our answer is usually yes. Expanding and improving our software to meet colleges' helps us build a feature-rich product that can meet any college's needs, so we love hearing the specific requests that colleges have for their catalog software.
If you have any questions about how Clean Catalog can help you transition to a digital catalog solution, use the form below or email us at [email protected].