How We Helped Heggerty Make Digital Learning a Reality
We partnered with Heggerty to create a website and digital curriculum in order to adapt to the evolving educational industry and meet growing demand from teachers for digital tools.
Meet Heggerty
Heggerty’s mission is to equip teachers with useful and engaging products and professional learning opportunities that empower all students to become lifelong readers. Their offering includes six curriculum sets, as well as in-person professional development. Their focus is on phonemic awareness, the ability to understand that spoken words are made up of individual sounds called phonemes, and it’s one of the best early predictors for reading success.
After the outbreak of COVID-19, many teachers were asking when Heggerty would have a digital version of their books and training resources available. To fulfill this urgent need, we worked with Heggerty to introduce a series of online resources to aid instructors, including a digital version of each course, training videos, and digital downloads.
Heggerty’s Challenges
Coming into this project, Heggerty had several issues they were looking to combat. They needed to bring marketing efforts into 2020. Their site was receiving a significant amount of traffic, but they weren’t capturing emails from users. They were also under mounting pressure to convert their printed books into digital versions and offer more online training courses.
The new website had to become a workhorse, complete with e-commerce, digital products, gated downloads, subscriptions, user management, group accounts, and more. And this all had to happen before the coming 2020 school year.
The Pilot
Heggerty initially approached us with a concrete idea—design and build a suite of custom digital products to bring their books and professional development online. They were also counting on us to help set expectations and create the roadmap to get there.
As we worked through our tried and true Pilot Phase in order to assess their needs based on competition, business goals, and audience, we learned we wouldn’t need to build a product from scratch—third-party platforms would meet their needs. And considering the fast-approaching school year, an expedited turnaround was pivotal. Enter WordPress, Learndash Learning Management System, and WooCommerce, our winning combination of third-party platforms.
Our Work
Tech Strategy
After significant research and testing, we determined that WordPress was the only Content Management System that could carry the weight of Heggerty’s new website. The WordPress CMS expedited our process through plugins like WooCommerce, Shipper HQ, Yoast SEO, and the Learning Management System, LearnDash. Through LearnDash we created well-organized digital versions of the curricula and injected video libraries designed to aid in teaching the courses.
Each course contains thirty-five weeks of daily Phonemic Awareness lessons. Teachers can now easily pull up the course on a laptop or mobile device to teach their classes remotely. Teachers and administrators can also control access and buying for individuals and groups through our integration of WooCommerce.
I hired Studio Rubric for their design sensibility, small and responsive team, and the fact that they're pleasant people to work with. However, beyond just a great looking product and dedicated team, they were able to catapult my company into the digital world with a new website and multiple digital products in only a few short months. The customer feedback is all positive and we're on track to see a positive ROI in less than a year.
- Andrew Follett, CEO
Moving Forward
Even though the site is launched, our work is ongoing. We're now working closely with Heggerty to enhance their digital courses and add more options for online lessons, downloads, and other professional development training. We're proud to help Heggerty provide a user-friendly solution to educators adapting to COVID-19 by bringing their digital curricula online.
These days, we're working with many of our clients to adapt to the newly remote world—no matter the industry. Please don't hesitate to reach out if your company or brand needs to ramp up your digital strategy. We're here to help.