Advance CPE is a webcast platform unlike any other.
Overview
CPAs are required to complete 40 hours per year of Continuing Professional Education (CPE). Accreditation entities establish the rules for CPE within their respective industries. NASBA, the organization setting the standards for CPAs, have more cumbersome requirements than other professions.
Off-the-shelf, large-scale video-based online education systems do not provide the necessary features (attendance checks, certificate distribution, etc.) to accommodate those requirements. As a result, most providers of CPE spend more then they need on substandard systems. Advance CPE automates all of them, solving nearly all the challenges these entities have been facing for decades.
Competitive Advantages
Here are just a few of the competitive advantages that most of the larger platforms lack:
- Ability to rebroadcast recordings of previous events for NASBA-approved CPE credit
- Scale – instructors can run courses as often as they wish; costs do not increase when the number of webcast events is increased
- Fully automated, non-disruptive attendance checks
- Attendance check counter to keep viewers informed of real-time progress during the event
- Certificates automatically generated immediately after the webcast is over
- Access to archive version of event immediately after webcast is over
- Clickable chapter links for enhanced customer experience during the archive
- Firm-friendly enrollment process – after setup, a single firm staffer can enroll any or all other staff from a particular firm
- Audience-Instructor interaction is independent of the platform, allowing a great deal of flexibility for the instructor while improving the customer experience
- Group-viewing: Multiple individuals can view the same event on the same device and all will automatically receive credit and a certificate if the group leader meets attendance criteria
- More. Much more.
Other benefits of an instructor running his/her content through Advance CPE include:
- Very generous revenue sharing system. Most content aggregators/resellers offer instructors 50-50 splits; Advance CPE starts with a base of 80-20.
- All operations, including e-commerce, compliance (if necessary), tech support and more is handled by Advance CPE.
Position
Advance CPE has been successfully proving its concept for the past three years. Three nationally recognized speakers (Jeff Sailor, Melisa Galasso (of Galasso Learning Solutions), and Patrick Garverick (of The Tax U)), have been utilizing the platform to expand their audiences and increase the profitability of their online content. Three others experts with less experience growing their audience are also using the platform, and verbal commitments have been obtained from two others in Q4.
For experts who don’t currently webcast (or who only webcast one-time live streams) and have a even a paltry mailing list of followers, this is free money.
Challenges
I am confident that with the proper expertise in place (and perhaps some additional fundraising), the goals listed below are achievable:
- Outreach efforts to convince potential clients/instructors of the numerous advantages of the Advance CPE platform can be more successful. Marketing expertise is needed to determine the optimal combination of message and media to grow from six instructors to sixty.
- Instructors using the platform are responsible for advertising their courses to their own audiences (this is the primary reason for the discrepancy between the top three producing instructors and the three that are not selling as much). The ability to incorporate marketing for existing clients would go a long way toward increasing per-instructor revenue and convincing more instructors to sign on.