#104 How To Wrap Up Your Live Cohort Program
This week we had the last live workshop call for an 8-week cohort program we manage at Affinity called Beyond Connections.
There are three things I like to do on the last live program call:
Celebrate the students & create connection
Run an end of program survey live
Launch a continuation offer
Let's break these down:
Celebrate the students & create connection
People buy for curriculum, engage through programming, and they stick around for community and connection.
The more you can create connection moments throughout the program, the more likely you are to retain them as a customer, or engaged community member, after the program ends.
Give students an opportunity to share their wins and celebrate one another. Here's a few ideas:
For large groups provide a prompt like "what has been your biggest breakthrough throughout the program?" and then put them in breakout rooms. When you bring them back have people share a few or drop what came up in the chat so you can save wins and have that data.
Create some slides with wins that were shared throughout the program to celebrate members live, and then have anyone not featured come off mute to share theirs as well.
Use time for show & tell – especially if your program has people create something tangible. For example, sharing a sales page design or their updated Notion dashboard.
Run an end of program survey live
The only way to measure if people get the transformation that you sold them is to ask. It's so important to run an end-of-program survey so that you can fuel your marketing (hello, testimonials!) AND improve your program for the next round.
Questions to include in your survey:
Something to measure success. If you ask assessment questions during onboarding, this is an opportunity for you to see improvement metrics. This could be starting & ending revenue numbers if it's a business growth program. For this program that is less tangible (about connection/networking) we asked them to rate their confidence levels in different connection scenarios.
How you can improve the program – get feedback so that you can make the next round better than the last. Programs are not set and forget, they evolve over time.
What they loved about the program – you can include a checkbox or yes/no question asking if you're able to use what they share as a testimonial. This is an easy way to collect lots of testimonials!
Make sure to use a mix of quantitative style questions (like ratings from 1-5 and specific metrics) so that you can share improvement averages across all students, and to ask a few open-ended questions so that you can get some direct quotes, too.
How to facilitate the survey live:
Share your gratitude, thank them for participating, and share that this survey is how you make the program better every round.
Drop the link in the chat, put on some music, tell everyone they can turn off their camera if they want and take a few minutes to finish it.
Reserve 7-10 minutes to have them take it live. I like to do it toward the end of the session so there is some good momentum. Make sure to leave enough time after to wrap up the call.
Typically end of program surveys can be pretty long... and therefore hard to get people to take. If you facilitate it live you'll get a great response rate!
Launch a continuation offer
You don't always have to pitch something at the end of the program but you should always provide next steps. It could be a free experience, an integration plan or roadmap so they can keep working toward their goals, or a next step paid experience.
Cheyenne recently launched a continuation offer after The Funnel Method program and the majority of program members joined. The continuation offer is a monthly membership for continued marketing, messaging, and funnel support.
Continuation offers are awesome for experimentation. You're not marketing on the front-end (social media, email, etc) so there is less risk for burning out audience.
For this program we want people to stay as alumni in the larger community experience so we wanted to keep that free, but we are experimenting with a mastermind program they can continue to have after the cohort. Masterminds are a core component of the 8-week program and so I think it could do really well. I'll report back how it converts! We have a two week enrollment period that just opened.
The most important thing about a continuation offer is that it's aligned with what people need next. How can you continue to help them be successful? What do they still need? Where are the gaps?
Collecting feedback throughout the program and paying attention to where people are stuck or moving slowly is going to help you shape this – so don't wait until the end of program survey to plan this!
If you loved this, you can subscribe to the weekly newsletter here for free! I send a bunch of resources & share a bts happenings of my business in the email version.