Hi Trudi,
Classes, Workshops, Bootcamps, and other events generated about 3% of our overall revenue in 2015.
3% of overall revenue, with about 65 such events held last year.
So at face value, these types of activities are indeed a lot of work, without a direct-financial upside for us, but the periphery-values are truly priceless, for us.
We learned to look at classes/workshops and such not as a profit-center but instead for two other periphery goals:
1) as an added-value for our existing members and clients.
2) as a way to raise awareness about our offering, our community, and potentially attract new folks to our core-service offering.
Clearly #1 (added-value for existing members and clients) meets our objectives of client-retention and product/service-differentiation, while #2 helps us raise awareness about our company, gain ambassadors (for those who don't convert to direct clients) and other times gain clients/members (whose lifetime value could be in tens of thousands of dollars).
We publish our on our website calendar, supplemented with an email blast each time, plus adding them to local Chamber of Commerce and other organizational calendars --and as a result our events pages combined traffic now exceeds the rest of our website pages. General roll-up page here:
http://www.officedivvy.com/classes/
Hope this perspective was helpful...
Ky Ekinci
Office Divvy