Brendan Marsello, Director of Member Support Services
This is one of the most common LERN member technical assistance questions, and one of the more important ones.
Maintaining a healthy cancellation rate that falls below 20%, the ideal cancellation rate, can be a tricky and daunting task. Here are the Top 3 Ways the most successful programs use to reduce their cancellation rates.
Try to price classes so they can run with 5 or fewer students.
Keeping your go/no go number low will both keep borderline classes from canceling and help keep profits high for more popular classes. When I was doing programing for a small community education program we often ran into issues where enrollments were just below the go/no go cut off on the day we had to make a decision about canceling the class.
Ask instructors and students to recruit.
Just before your deadline to cancel a class, email the instructors and students in those classes in danger of being cancelled and ask them to recruit just one more student. Some programs have reported reducing their cancelled courses by 20% asking for just one more student.
Ask instructors to accept lower pay.
If it was really close (let’s say 4 people had enrolled in a class that needs 5 in your case), I would contact the instructor and let them know about the situation. I would let them know that as things stood I would have to cancel the class due to low enrollment but that we could run the class if they were willing to accept a reduced pay rate. I would adjust the go/no go to fit 4 students and let the teacher know what that rate would be. I would also let them know that if we got some last minute registrations and enrollments got over the original go/no go level, their payment would go back to the original amount. I found that most teachers would still want to teach the class because they had already prepared for it and were excited to teach, as well as make some money. This can be a way to cancel fewer “borderline” classes that have almost reached their go/no-go number.
For more ideas, see our other articles on Cancellation Rate Tips here in the LERN Club.