Raven RSM was using a mixture of systems that weren’t fit for purpose for running a training business. It was costing them in time, money and staff happiness. They stumbled across Arlo in a Google search and figured they had nothing to lose by starting a free trial. What they didn’t know was just how much they had to gain.
Since 1982 Raven RSM has been the go-to for rescue services, equipment and training in British Columbia, Canada. Raven’s unified vision is to “make Canadians safer” and they are accomplishing that mission with industry-leading excellence in rescue, safety and medical training. They deliver a mix of public and private courses for those operating in high risk environments – including water rescue, wilderness first responder, confined space rescue, rope rescue and ice rescue.
Raven is a member of Rescue 3 International which is an international accrediting body for world-class technical rescue courses. All of Raven’s courses are developed and certified by Rescue 3 and are NFPA compliant.
Raven was co-founded by Joanne Devlin-Morrison and her husband Ron Morrison. Joanne’s day-to-day job at Raven is Retail Sales & Office Administrator. When it comes to health and safety training, Ron and Joanne are a force to be reckoned with. They’ve built a credible brand, a network of qualified instructors, and an impressive catalog of world-class training courses that are in high-demand. But they were increasingly sacrificing their time, money and happiness due to mis-matched systems that weren’t designed to manage commercial training.
Like Eventbrite.
“I think using Eventbrite may work for single events but it does not work for businesses that have large amounts of students that take courses each year. It wasn’t right for our company.”
– Joanne Devlin-Morrison
Eventbrite is designed for one-off events – not recurring, instructor-led training courses. And Joanne and the team were spending a lot of money trying to figure out how to get their processes working and how to get their systems to talk to each other.
Eventually the pain points became so unbearable that they started looking for a new solution. That’s when Ron stumbled across Arlo in a Google search and figured he had nothing to lose by starting a free trial.
Ron could quickly see that he was onto something good – Arlo was checking every single box in terms of what they were looking for in a training management system. He asked other stakeholders at Raven to have a go on the trial platform – from their accountant, to their marketing team, to Joanne from an administration perspective. Everyone agreed – Arlo was exactly what they needed.
One of their biggest challenges with Eventbrite was that it took their customers away from the Raven website to complete their course registration. It was a poor customer experience and one of the main draw cards for Raven to make the switch to Arlo. Registration and checkout is now built into Raven’s existing WordPress website and matches their brand fonts, colours and styles. Customers simply provide their details, payment and custom information in one single process.
And once they’re registered? Customers receive automatic confirmation of their enrolment via email, with course details, instructions and any PDF attachments they need for the course. If customers need to cancel their registration, the course spot is automatically given to the next person on the waitlist. No more manual email communications or waitlist management for Joanne.
But the one feature they couldn’t live without?
“The one feature we couldn’t live without is automated certification”, says Joanne.
Customer records are stored in Arlo’s in-built CRM and certificates are automatically sent once a course has been completed. A bonus… Arlo sends automatic reminders to customers when their certificate is due to expire and they need to renew their certification.
With more than 50 instructors across Canada teaching courses in challenging environments, managing attendance and issuing certifications used to be a major pain point. Now, instructors can access their own courses via the Arlo mobile app and quickly see how many people are in their class, their names and contact information, and mark attendance.
Arlo has replaced many manual processes and disparate systems at Raven including a historical custom-made solution that was out of date, a CRM and of course, Eventbrite. The systems that they’ve kept at Raven – such as Hubspot and WordPress – now integrate seamlessly with Arlo and work as one unified solution. No more manually updating information between systems.
The result? Arlo has reduced administration by +25% at Raven.
“Arlo has saved me a lot of time. I’ve gained back at least 25% of my working day that I was spending on manual administration. And there’s less paper, which is nice!”
– Joanne Devlin-Morrison
Joanne says Arlo has modernised their business and put them well ahead of their competitors.
And when they made the switch to Arlo, Joanne and the team found that onboarding was a breeze. The free trial answered a lot of their pre-existing questions, and the platform was intuitive and easy to use. For everything else, Joanne says Arlo’s extensive resources, such as onboarding videos and help articles, made it easy to search for answers when learning how to use the software.
