By Pancharatna das
It’s been just over a year since we launched the completed Chantnow.com on Radhastami, 17th September 2018 and the results have been very encouraging.
We began with an experimental Facebook advertising campaign that resulted in a surge of 275 people enrolling in our 7 day Chanting workshop at an advertising cost of just about $1 each. We knew we could generate student enrollments, but could we keep them progressing?
To focus on student services, we then turned to fine-tuning our systems of automated cultivation using emails based on our users participation. Users who start the workshop but don’t complete automatically get a series of encouraging emails, while those who complete get emails urging them to go forward with the full Mantra Meditation course.
We also launched Facebook groups for our students where we could interact more directly. And, we are keeping our Facebook and Instagram pages active with frequent content designed to nurture and grow our community of students.
Gradually we are getting results with more than 150 students completing the workshop and 40 going on to take the full Mantra Meditation course that goes deeper into the practice and principles of bhakti-yoga.
We’ve also been using printed bookmarks, supplied to devotees in the USA and elsewhere to hand out, and we are seeing direct traffic to our site from this effort. You can download the graphics for the bookmark from Chantnow.com/promotions and use it with your own outreach efforts. There is a graphic for a retractable display there too, like the one used in the photo here.
And, people are coming from a number of devotee sites that have added links to Chantnow.com, like KrishnaWisdom.com in the UK and Krishnavillage-retreat.com in Australia.
Through these efforts and people just searching online we have seen a steady stream of new people enrolling in the chanting workshop.
Then, a few months ago, we obtained a grant from Google Adwords for advertising through their platform and the enrollments have more than doubled as you can see from this chart.
We are now up to over 700 students
All of this has been achieved with a small team of part-time volunteers and staff and we see great potential for growth with more help. Volunteers are needed in many areas
First we’re looking for content creators who can help create more engaging content for our students. We especially need bloggers willing to create articles exclusively for our platform.
Next, we need more online guides for our students. If you have good internet access and English language skills and would like to help guide students, please consider becoming one of our online mentors.
Copy writers, graphic designers and web developers are needed to help create more effective landing pages and other content that will stimulate more students to sign up.
Maybe you’re interested in creating new courses. There’s lots of scope for adding more to our learning management platform.
Finally, please just adopt ChantNow.com as your own and send interested people to the site. If you write us we’ll be happy to help you personally follow-up with contacts in your area.
ChantNow.com is an outreach effort of ISKCON Online and has demonstrated the immense potential to cover the world with the maha-mantra through the power of the internet. Look at this map. We’ve reached 74 countries from Argentina to Zimbabwe! And that, while we have focused only on major English speaking countries.
We hope you will join us in realizing this potential. Not only does Chantnow.com reach people outside of our regular contacts, but it is a great way to complement outreach efforts like book distribution. So with the Srila Prabhupada Marathon coming up we hope you will make Chantnow.com bookmarks part of your strategy.
Please join our team at Chantnow.com/volunteer or write to me at Pancharatna@chantnow.com to learn more.
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