How Hope Reins Turned a Ranch Into an Online Academy

Cami doesn’t run an online learning platform for a living; she runs horses.

Well, technically, she runs the academy at Hope Reins, a 38‑acre ranch in Raleigh, North Carolina. Their mission: pair kids in crisis with a horse and a mentor. Give them hope and healing.

For years, that meant kids came to the ranch to work with horses, and many lives changed in the process.

Then they hit a wall.

The ranch could only hold so many kids. Days of the week, timing, and staff capacity; they were maxed out. And Cami’s team looked at each other and asked a question that would change everything:

What if we can’t bring every kid here? What if we equip others to do this work in their own communities?

That’s when the Hope Reins Academy was born. Not because they wanted to build an online community, but because they had to. This led to a quirky, unexpectedly delightful learning space where people don’t just watch videos; they ask about punctuation.

Let’s get into it.

The Problem: They Knew Horses, Not LMSs

Before GroupApp, Hope Reins tried the obvious route: build a learning management system on their own website. 

• They had a web designer. 
• They had some cookie‑cutter programming tools. 
• They had high hopes.

It was hard.

“There was a lot of communicating with our web designer,” Cami recalls. “It was hard to build something from scratch that was really user‑friendly.”

Meanwhile, they’d already started recording course videos. Twenty modules, nearly done. They had the content and the heart, so they just needed a place to put it that wouldn’t make people want to throw their laptop out a window.

Then a friend of a friend mentioned GroupApp, and Cami’s ears perked up.

The Lightbulb Moment: “Wait, This Thing Actually Looks Good”

Cami has a degree in management information systems. She holds her fingers about an inch apart. “I have about that much computer programming,” she says. “I’m by far not qualified to do a lot of things.”

So when she saw GroupApp, two things made her eyes go wide:

1. The interface was clean. Simple front end, simple back end. What you see is what you get.
2. No programming required. Click a button. Settings done. Magic.

“The ease of use on the admin side was a huge selling point,” she says. “That plus just a beautiful interface.”

She took it to her finance team with the news: “Hey, this has Stripe built in.”

They said no.

(They use Stripe now. But Cami still teases them about it.)

The Setup: From Spreadsheets to Stripe (Sort Of)

Because Hope Reins is a nonprofit, their payment processing isn’t simple. They use a platform called QGive, so for the first launch, they had to do payments outside GroupApp. Cami built spreadsheets to track who bought what, and while they worked, they weren’t pretty.

But getting the course onto GroupApp? That part was laughably easy.

“The course type is a web video. Boom, put the link in. To go from zero to having a course completely done is the easiest part. You would think that would be arduous, but it just… happened.”

They set up a membership model where students buy a course and get the first year’s membership free. That way, if someone wants access again next year, they just renew the membership; no hunting for where they bought it.

And because courses sit right there in the community, anyone who buys one sees the others right in front of them. “There’s no advertising we have to do on our side necessarily,” Cami says. “Anybody who’s using it is being exposed to the rest of our content throughout the LMS. Super handy.”

The Smart Move: A Library So Good People Stop Hunting

Here’s where Cami’s love of order really paid off.

Their first course had 21 modules, each with a video and a bunch of additional resources: PDFs, worksheets, and handouts. In the old system, people had to click into each module to find the document they needed.

“Oh gosh, was that document in module 18?” Cami mimics. “Click, click, click, go through the courses to try to find this additional resource.”

And if someone wanted to download everything at the end? That was a lot of clicking.

So they flipped the model. Instead of attaching files to lessons, they put everything in a searchable library and hyperlinked each lesson directly to it.

Now documents live in one place, so students can find them from the lesson or go straight to the library and download everything at once. 

Plus, when they added a second course, they didn’t have to re‑upload resources. Update one place. Done.

Cami beams. “I love order.”

The Launch: 25 People, Then Crickets

Hope Reins launched their first course, Essentials: How to Start or Strengthen a Faith‑Based Equine Mentorship Program, in March of last year.

They started with a list of about 100 people who had reached out over the years after reading the book Joey, which tells the story of how Hope Reins began. Those people had been asking for years: How do we do what you do?

Cami emailed them. Twenty‑five signed up.

Then… crickets.

“It was like, okay,” she says, laughing. “We didn’t have a marketing team for this. Our marketing team was already full‑time soliciting donations. And our donor base isn’t necessarily the same people who would buy a course.”

So they let it sit for a bit. They learned and tweaked.

In October, they started digital marketing, collected about a thousand leads, and then realized they hadn’t made it easy to actually purchase. “We just haven’t mastered that yet,” Cami admits. “But now we have a thousand names in our database to keep marketing to.”

They’re streamlining now with a dedicated landing page, a Stripe integration, and a smoother flow.

But here’s the thing: they didn’t let imperfection stop them. They launched, learned, and kept going.

The Feedback That Made Them Laugh (and Cry Happy Tears)

When they launched their second course, Healing‑Based Horsemanship, they did a pilot group first. A small cohort to test everything.

Cami was nervous: 

• Would the platform work?
• Would people get confused? 
• Would the content land?

Then the feedback started rolling in.

One person commented on a resource: “There wasn’t a period at the end of the sentence.”

Cami nearly cried with joy.

“This is the best feedback ever!” she says. “There was not one thing said about the platform. Other than ‘that was so easy to use.’ People weren’t getting caught up in things. They could just laser‑beam on the content.”

That’s when she knew it was working because the content was all they could see.

The Lesson: You Can Do This Too

Cami is refreshingly honest about what it took.

“Running an online learning community is absolutely, positively not the core of my job,” she says. She’s the academy manager. She does horses. She does kids. She wrangles videographers and proofreads scripts. She’s a one‑woman army with a spreadsheet addiction.

And yet.

She offers three pieces of advice for anyone, especially other nonprofits, thinking about doing the same:

1. Talk to your attorney. Hope Reins is literally changing their articles of incorporation to make training an explicit part of their mission. “Selling something as a nonprofit is an interesting space,” Cami says. “Do the legal work upfront.”
2. Know your user segments. Who should see what? Plan it before you build it.
3. Have clear communication channels. Tech issues? Content questions? Give people a clear place to go. “The more confusion you can take off anybody, the better.”

And her golden rule, borrowed from the coding world: Spend 90% of your time planning and 10% executing.

“Having things outlined and developed offline and then putting them online is way easier,” she says. “Be thoughtful going into it.”

The Inspiring Part (Because This Story Deserves It)

Here’s what gets me.

Hope Reins didn’t start this journey because they wanted to be an online education company. They started because they had a mission: provide hope and healing to kids in crisis. When the ranch reached capacity, they refused to say, “Sorry, we’re full.”

Instead, they asked a bigger question: What if we could multiply?

Now, people across the country are using their courses to start programs in their own communities. Kids who will never set foot on that 38‑acre ranch in Raleigh are still getting hope and healing. Because Cami and her team decided to share what they learned, even when it meant learning how to do it themselves.

And yeah, there were hiccups:

• Stripe negotiations. 
• Spreadsheet tracking. 
• A thousand leads they haven’t fully converted yet. 
• A punctuation‑obsessed beta tester.

But every week, they take one more manual process off the table, and they get a little more streamlined and automated.

And somewhere out there, a kid is finding hope because a person in their town took a course from a horse ranch in North Carolina.

That’s not just an online community. That’s a movement.

The Playbook (If You Want to Steal It)

If you’re a nonprofit, a small business, or just someone with a mission and a dream of scaling impact, here’s what you can borrow from Hope Reins:

• Start with what you already have. They had videos, a waiting list of interested people, and a story people wanted to learn from. Use your existing assets.
• Don’t build from scratch if you don’t have to. They tried website LMSs and found them painful. A purpose‑built platform saved them months of headaches.
• Get your payment flow right, but don’t let it stop you. They launched with a workaround (spreadsheets + QGive) and improved later.
• Make resources easy to find. A centralized library beats digging through course modules every time.
• Listen to feedback, even the tiny stuff. If someone is complaining about punctuation, it means the platform is working, and they’re deep in your content.
• Plan 90%, execute 10%. Map it out offline. Then let the platform do the heavy lifting.
• Stay true to your mission. Everything Cami and her team did loops back to serving kids. That clarity carried them through the messy middle.

Turn Your Mission Into a Community Today

Toward the end of our conversation, Cami talked about how they’re finally moving the waiver to after the purchase instead of before. It sounds small, but it was a major bottleneck.

“Now we auto‑redirect people to the waiver after they buy, then back to the community,” she said. “It was step two or three instead of step one.”

She laughed. “I think that’ll help a lot.”

That’s the thing about Cami. She’s not pretending it’s easy. She’s just relentlessly, cheerfully, spreadsheet‑by‑spreadsheet making it work. And in doing so, she’s proving that you don’t need a big marketing budget or a tech background to build something that changes lives.

You just need a mission, a willingness to learn, and maybe a horse or two.

If you’re ready to turn your expertise into a community, whether you’re teaching horsemanship, healing, or just how to get through the day, take a page from Hope Reins. See what GroupApp can do for you.