Hello Literacy

The Challenge

Hello Literacy has two core business functions it offers to its customers:

• Professional development to help educators grow their literacy education techniques
• Education materials educators can use in their curriculum with students

To do both, Founder and CEO Jen Jones had a mix of speaking events, 1:1 consulting sessions, educator products, and video recordings. Before establishing Hello Literacy, Jen leveraged Teachers Pay Teachers in 2011, an online eCommerce platform for educators to share and sell resources. While this model worked to a degree, it couldn’t quite do everything Jen needed.

By 2018, Jen realized she needed a way to expand her business model to create an easier way to sell her products. Using TPT is incredibly effective for her, but she needed a tool to disseminate the content. That's when she started looking for a tool that enables her to create, store, and deliver content in an easily manageable way.

At the time, Jen had only heard of platforms like Skillshare and Kajabi that could fulfill her needs. She needed a tool that allowed her to:

• House her education products on an easily accessible platform.
• Create professional development courses to connect with her seminars
• Ability to deliver resources a la carte or bundled
• Enables asynchronous learning for educators to use with students
• Create and deliver certificates to educators that complete Jen’s PD training
• Integrate an eCommerce solution to monetize her products

Unfortunately, neither platform was really able to meet Jen’s needs. She also needed a way to make the experience more user friendly for her customers. This meant enabling her customers to find the content they wanted, and access the products through one account.

Jen also faced a difficult challenge with how 2020 impacted her business. Because COVID-19 had many school districts shut down and forced to go online, the bulk of her in-person events were canceled. This meant she had to find a solution to digitize her offering while still delivering the best quality she’s known for with educators.

Listen to Jen's story on Ep. 4 of The CoLab Podcast!

Blog link: https://coassemble.com/blog/podcast/the-colab-podcast-episode-4-delivering-meaningful-learning-experiences-with-jen-jones/

The Solution

Jen found Coassemble because we were the clear choice for what she needed for her business needs in 2018 compared to other market solutions. Jen also has family connections with our Head of Operations, Dimity, and asked for her advice when shopping for a solution.

Jen’s biggest challenge in 2018 was to create, store, and disseminate recordings for her PD recordings. If her customers could purchase the recordings they wanted in one, easily accessible space, that would save Jen time. She also needed a way to digital store and manage all of the teacher products she’s created over the years as well as new content she develops.

One of the biggest ways Jen began implementing Coassemble was by using the course feature to create educator products that could be used to drive classroom activities. As an expert in the field, Jen constantly is referred to for instructional design with literacy. So by creating an easily accessible set of products in one space, she was able to expand her customer base.

Jen also had to transition her in-person PD seminars to online events. So what she did was create live virtual sessions and then add the recordings to Coassemble for anyone to buy after. This helped her to provide a way for educators to purchase and access her sessions whenever it was convenient for them.

The Results

Jen wants her customers to feel empowered to grow and develop their literacy instruction skills. All of her products must meet two criteria to be met: that it makes students think and that it’s original (she never recycles content). By combining her business model with Coassemble, Jen was able to massively expand her customer reach by automating much of her manual processes.

Microlearning is a core function of how Jen creates Hello Literacy products. By breaking down concepts in bite-sized chunks, Jen can create effective balanced literacy learning content. She’s now able to organize her educator products easily and enable them to use them immediately in their classrooms based on need. And she’s always looking at what the community needs most. So having the ability to revise and adjust her products in one space optimizes all of her creation processes.

Jen’s been using Coassemble with Hello Literacy for over two years, but 2020 was the year she saw it all come together. Jen’s able to help hundreds of teachers with her online training.

“Between April and December of 2020, we have helped over 2,500 teachers.”