Yoga Teacher Training Software: Spotlight on Jivamukti Yoga

We’ve worked with Jivamukti Yoga since 2013 helping the team create and manage their yoga teacher training and retreats, including registration and payment management. Regpack’s online payment software is what lets the team collect tuition and deposits in the same flow as sign-up.

Katherine Phipps has been practicing Jivamukti yoga since 2011, and has been supporting students in their Journey to Jivamukti Teacher training as part of the global Jivamukti community. She has also played a key role in the Charter for Change initiative.

Below, Katherine tells the story of how Regpack and Jivamukti have partnered together to effectively manage their training programs.

Katherine details how, when COVID became a reality, Regpack allowed them to continue to offer their programs online, and eventually in a hybrid model without a negative impact on their internal workflow.

What is Jivamukti Yoga and what is your role?

The Jivamukti Yoga teacher training was developed in the late 1980’s by Sharon and David, who were artists who met in New York City and went to India. They were among the first Western people who went to India and were accepted and given the blessing of their three Indian Guru’s to teach the Jivamukti method. They took the teachings and they codified it and made it a method that is accessible to modern practitioners in English.

Traditionally we offer 300-hour teacher trainings and it was the type of intensive that required you go away for 1 month. This is the program we have run through Regpack for almost a decade now.

What do you love about using Regpack?

I use Regpack every day. It’s pinned in my browser!

I use Regpack to do everything.

We have 4 programs accepting registrations currently, we’re going to add a 5th and also a donation project. Every program is different, either it’s a different type of program or course, different dates or in different locations. I’m constantly looking between our projects to see new registrations coming in or managing leads and interest for each individual offering.

I get an email maybe once every two months from Regpack with some new feature and I love it! Everything you add is something that I know will make my life so much easier.

We’ve also worked with Regpack since 2013, so it’s amazing that I can go into our account and find an invoice from several years ago if I need to, and the information is all there!

How do you like managing payments for trainings in Regpack?

It’s so easy. Since some of our offerings are high value, it’s important as the training coordinator that we have a secure system like Regpack that is easy to use and allows our clients to process large payments easily.

The system makes it easy for me to check on clients who have signed up, who has made a payment, who has completed all their forms, etc.

We do love Regpack as a payment processor because it’s so flexible.

We have clients in every country in the world. And frequently there are different banking rules and of course different currencies and different exchange rates.

It’s great that we can offer both credit card and debit card processing to make it easy for all of our clients. We use Regpack to enter wire transfers, grants, and scholarships as well.

We’ve also used Regpack to create different projects specific to 1 currency type. We’ve had projects in Great British Pounds, Euro, and Dollars. So depending on where we believe our primary audience is, and where the training is going to be hosted, we’re able to make it that much easier for the client to pay in the local currency.

So for Europeans, for instance, that’s where I find it most meaningful to be able to offer the registration in Euros and avoid the headache for us and them with bank transfers and exchange rates.  Having everything so integrated is super!

I can also easily create invoices for students when requested.

What used to take me 5-10 minutes per student now takes just 1 minute using the token feature.

I can send an invoice with 2 clicks using a template and students can easily print it out and use it how they need. It’s so helpful.

You recently began using Regpack for donations as well, right?

Yes! We just launched an independent initiative called Charter for Change.

We started to look for a funding platform and I realized that many of them have a processing fee of 3-5% for every transaction.  That’s a lot of money, especially when you are fundraising!

So, I turned to Regpack and connected with the Support team and they made it super easy to set up a donation campaign. We walked through how to set it up through a template and embed it right onto our Charter for Change website. I felt very supported by the team and like the Regpack team is on our side.

How flexible is Regpack in terms of setup and customizing the experience for your in-person and virtual trainings?

Regpack makes it so easy for me to pull multi-dimensional reports. We have people coming from all over the world to live together for a month so it’s important to filter to get the data I need.

There is a lot of information to coordinate. I spend a lot of my time emailing with the students preparing them for this life-changing journey. It’s my job to communicate to their mentor or the facilitator of the event about the students coming. I want to learn about each one so I can place them in the right groups.

Regpack is so intuitive to categorize users based on any data point.

I use the tagging system to mark and identify students based on their progress through registration, including whether they’ve been given a grant or scholarship, made a partial payment, are they fully paid, etc.

The customization of labeling users, the fact that all the colors can be changed means that I can create a system that’s meaningful to me. Regpack makes my job very easy. 

We also now have this hybrid system of both in-person and virtual trainings. So we have online training and residential training and they are concurrent. The online students are either on Zoom or watching the lessons on an online learning platform on demand. For those attending in-person, there are also room options. I have a lot of different products to manage depending on the student and how they will attend. I also want to control the experience of the students when registering so the virtual don’t see the room options and vice versa. Regpack makes that easy to customize.

I can also create private products if I need to add a special fee or product to a student, and just add it to their cart. So there is the ability to have it all!

This past year we had our biggest group for our training in our history! Managing all of those registrations was a lot, but so easy to do with Regpack. Having all the virtual and residential students clearly tagged, and being able to run reports in an integrated way made all the difference.

Would you recommend Regpack to other organizations looking to onboard and manage for their training programs?

Emphatically, yes!

Regpack is easy to use, and very user-friendly for our students.

You don’t have to be a technology-oriented person to learn how to use Regpack well.

It has a high degree of personalization and allows you to get to know your students before they arrive.

The payment features are easy and secure. Our students have never been nervous about spending a lot of money on their programming for something that is very important to them, using Regpack. It’s easy to trust!

The UI and user experience are just really good and very friendly. It’s so easy to embed on our website.

It’s very easy to put your registration forms on your website and create an optimal flow. We know that the fewer times people have to click around, the more likely they will complete sign-up and Regpack creates this experience for us.

A beautiful welcome email is automatically sent out once someone enters their name and email and their journey with us begins!