Who uses, who pays, who influences

A purchase can involve up to three roles. The user takes the service, the payer pays and usually makes the final choice, and the influencer shapes the choice by recommending. Marketing has to know who holds which role, because they ask different questions and meet you in different places.

In a Klasna exam family the roles split: the teen uses the lessons, the parent pays and decides, and a school teacher often influences by recommending a tutor. Three people, three questions.

For adults learning English, the roles usually collapse into one person: they study, pay and decide, often after searching on their own (search is the most common first source for adults paying for themselves in Klasna's export). One person, one conversation.

So the same school needs two different playbooks: a family plan that speaks to the parent, respects the teen and makes the teacher's recommendation easy, and an adult plan that speaks directly to the learner.

In a family purchase, each role carries its own risk, so each asks its own question, and a message that answers one rarely answers the others. Recall the roles: the user takes the lessons, the payer pays and decides, the influencer recommends.

In a Klasna exam family:

• The teen (user) risks time and effort: "Will the lessons be bearable, and will they actually help me?"
• The parent (payer) risks money and peace of mind: "Is it worth it, and will I see progress before the exam?"
• The school teacher (influencer) risks reputation: "Can I recommend them without it coming back to me?"

A message about patient tutors and fun formats speaks to the teen; weekly written progress notes speak to the parent; a clear, honest description of how Klasna works with the school program makes the teacher's recommendation easy. One generic ad tries to speak to all three and convinces none.

An influencer can work almost like a channel, but count its weight in your data before planning around it.

In Klasna's export the heard_from column records where each account first heard of Klasna. Among exam-prep accounts (goal = national_exam), 16 of the 40 spring crammers and 11 of the 24 steady exam families answered school_teacher: 16 + 11 = 27, and 27 ÷ 64 = 0.421875 = 42.19%. Only 5 of the 96 other accounts heard from a teacher.

Other groups have other influencers: younger-learner and diaspora families mostly hear from friends and family; adults paying for themselves mostly find Klasna by searching on their own.

So for exam families the school teacher is the single biggest influencer in the file, which makes the teacher's question ("can I recommend them safely?") a real part of the marketing plan, and an honest relationship with teachers worth getting right.

Klasna's house rule: in family purchases the parent is the audience and the teen the user; Klasna doesn't aim advertising at children and never uses profiling to show ads to minors. The rule comes first because it's Klasna's own choice, whatever any platform allows.

The law points the same way (as of October 2026; check the current rules before every campaign): Ukraine's advertising law limits advertising aimed at children; EU consumer rules bar ads that directly urge children to buy or to persuade adults to buy for them; and EU platform rules bar online platforms from showing profiling-based ads to users they know with reasonable certainty are minors.

Leo's idea, ads for teens on a short-video platform so they ask their parents, is exactly the "persuade your parents" pattern. Parents approving the purchase afterwards doesn't change whom the ads were aimed at. The plan reaches the parent directly with the parent's question: is it worth it, and will I see progress?

There's a clear line between using a fact in your own records and using it to aim advertising. The same field can be fine on one side and off limits on the other.

Klasna's export has learner_age. Using it to describe segments ("spring crammers average 16.2"), to plan lesson times or to choose suitable materials is ordinary service work. Turning it into a field for aiming ads at minors is not: Klasna's audience for marketing to families is the parent, the payer.

The practical test: who sees the result? A segment description lives inside Klasna's plan and shapes how the team serves people. A targeting setting decides who on a platform sees an ad. For anyone under 18, Klasna's answer to the second is always "not the teen".

So keeping age in the data isn't a contradiction of the no-ads-to-minors rule; it's what lets the team plan good lessons while marketing only to parents.

Klasna defines and reaches segments by situation and need, never by sensitive personal traits and never by profiling minors.

Sensitive traits include ethnic origin, religion, health, sexual orientation and similar. EU data-protection rules treat them as special categories, and Ukrainian law protects them too; Klasna doesn't collect them and doesn't target on them. Gender stereotypes are out as well: "something cute just for mums" ignores the dads, grandparents and guardians who choose and pay too.

Acceptable: "parents living in an EU country who want their child to keep up the Ukrainian curriculum" (a situation); ads placed next to articles about exam preparation, written for parents (context, not profiling); adults who have said they're interested in working abroad (their own stated interest).

Not acceptable: profiling-based ads to users under 18; targeting by religion or ethnicity ("Ukrainians abroad" as an identity rather than a situation); campaigns that ask children to persuade their parents.

Situation describes what the family needs; identity only describes who they are.

A sign-up form should collect only what the lessons and the purchase need, ask the payer, and keep marketing consent a separate, unticked choice.

Klasna's old form asked for the parent's phone, the teen's phone, the school and a birthday "for a nice greeting". The new one: the parent's contact, subject, goal, preferred lesson times, and an unticked box for marketing news.

The reasons, as Klasna's own rules: data that isn't needed is a risk with no benefit; a birthday for greetings needs a clear reason and consent, and for a teen that consent comes from the parent; the teen's own phone is never a marketing contact. Marketing messages go only to people who agreed to receive them, with an easy way to stop. In most cases EU and Ukrainian rules on data protection and electronic marketing require the same (as of October 2026); the narrow exceptions for existing customers aren't worth building a plan on.

Pre-ticked boxes and fields such as religion "to respect holidays" break these rules however friendly the intent.

An influencer's value comes from being trusted, and that trust breaks the moment a recommendation is secretly bought. A recommendation families can't see is paid for isn't an honest one, and it can count as hidden advertising, which Ukrainian and EU law prohibit.

Klasna's rules for school teachers, its biggest influencer for exam families:

• Never pay individual teachers per family, openly or quietly, in cash or as codes passed off as advice.
• A partnership, if any, is written, institutional and disclosed: with a school, agreed after checking the school's own rules (conflict of interest; anti-corruption rules for state-school staff).
• Make an honest recommendation easy: a clear description of how Klasna works with the school program, what a trial looks like, what parents get each week.
• Never ask anyone to post reviews pretending to be a parent.

How it fits together: a family purchase has a user, a payer and an influencer with different questions; teens are users and parents the audience; segments are defined by situation, not identity; forms collect only what's needed; influence stays honest. The next lesson is the module's case: naming all of Klasna's segments.