You want to be the best business owner and childcare provider available. And that means providing exceptional service to your customers in the form of quality education for children and easy administration and communication for parents.
You need to get parents to sing your praises, refer their friends, and spread the word about how great your childcare center is so your enrollment remains at full capacity.
But to make all that happen, you first need to focus on becoming a high-quality childcare provider. Here are the focus areas where you need to put your time and effort.
- Build High-quality Educational Programming
The curriculum you offer is the basis of what you’re selling. Yes, you offer safe, loving care for children. But that’s the baseline of what parents expect.
Parents also want to know that their child is learning and preparing for the next step in their education. A quality program should be focused on the development milestones that children should accomplish based on their age.
If you’re tracking these milestones in your childcare software, you’ll be able to pull statistics easily to demonstrate the value you provide and the timeline for when children in your program generally accomplish each important milestone. This tells parents just how much attention you give to these milestones.
Programming should include attention to various topics and subjects, including teaching letters and letter sounds, basic math, science, and art. When parents inquire about your programs, you can share details about the various educational programs while quoting your students’ statistics.
- Hire Qualified, Experienced Staff and Invest in Continuing Education
Take time to seek out the most qualified and experienced staff members for your program. While it might mean a longer hiring process and paying a slightly higher hourly rate, you’ll see the benefits in an increased close rate from interested parent inquiries.
And if you hire qualified teachers, you might qualify for the Quality Rating and Improvement System. One aspect of attracting the best staff members is having an effective payroll process and procedure. Paying your people digitally and with reliable regularity will help you keep your best team members.
- Review Processes and Look for Automation Opportunities
Regardless of the size and maturity of your childcare center, you can always improve processes and automate recurring activities to save time. As you look for ways to be more efficient with your time and resources, consider ways you can automate the following activities.
- Invoicing and payments (your childcare app should make this simple)
- Segment your email list by customers, previous customers, and prospects to make your messaging more targeted to the audience
- Find a content type or mix that works best on each of your social channels. This will take some trial and error, but from that time, you should get better promotional content and reach more people with your messages
- Market your center using highly targeted ads. Be picky about who your ideal customer is to experience the greatest return on investment. And remember that childcare is a very local service, so target people within a small radius of your center
- Send a monthly newsletter to ensure parents and stakeholders know what’s happening at your center. This might include details about topics you’re covering in the classroom and achievements students make. This can be beneficial to existing parents and prospective parents considering your program.
- Improve your enrollment processes. Enrolling in your program should be fast and easy. If opening a bank account can be done entirely online, so can enrolling a child in a new daycare program. Review your enrollment process to look for locations that might build friction between your prospects and them becoming customers.
Software can help immensely with improving processes and automated repeatable processes, including regular reports and packaging information for purposes of licensing or subsidy payments.
To offer the best program in your area, schedule a demo of iCare Software and see how we can help you organize your curriculum, pay your teachers, collect tuition payments (including automated flexible care billing), communicate with parents, and track developmental milestones and much more.