As the end of the year approaches, you may be assembling a list of your goals for next year. There’s a good chance that growing your enrollment is high on that list.
Tuition payments are the main source of income for child care centers. And without enough children enrolled in their programs, paying the bills and keeping your doors open becomes a real challenge. So attracting new families is a key part of operating your business.
Let’s look at some tips to boost your enrollment and how using software by Procare Solutions can help!
Manage Prospective Customers with Procare’s Leads Insights Tool
Lead Insights is a dashboard that shows how effective your center is at converting prospective customers, also known as leads, into customers to help you drive enrollment.
Procare Online allows you to generate tours, schedule phone calls and automatically schedule follow-ups and email reminders.
It applies software metrics tailored to measure the effectiveness and health of how your child care center is managing those leads. And it gives you the results in a simple format:
Leads Insights also shows how your customers move from showing interest to enrolling through an easy-to-follow pipeline illustration, which is a snapshot of leads by status for a given date, allowing you to compare one date to another.
And it uses an insights funnel diagram to help you visualize how prospective customers are moving toward enrollment, from start to finish.
The funnel shows you how a family goes from being interested in your center, to touring it, to being admitted and ultimately enrolled, which is the bottom of the funnel. It shows you the percentage of leads that convert from one status to the next, as well as the average time a prospective customer spends in each status.
Check out our support page here to learn more about how this feature can help you grow your business!
And don’t forget that Procare Desktop is integrated with ChildcareCRM. That means customers can get ChildcareCRM’s software to help manage and track enrollment inquiries, while building relationships with parents and caregivers.
Make Sure Your Tours Show Off What Makes Your Center Special
Tours of your child care center are the first impression parents get of your business. If your tours don’t inspire trust, parents won’t enroll their kids in your program and your center won’t grow.
Highlight what makes your center different from the others in your area and send parents home with detailed enrollment packets. Packets should include a list of what makes your daycare the best in town, several glowing reviews from past or current customers and your phone number and email address.
And following up with parents who’ve toured your center is key! Make communicating by text messages a priority.
Check out our blog that shares five tips on how to improve tours at your child care center.
Digitize Your Registration Forms
Parents like knowing they can fill out enrollment paperwork online at a time and place that’s convenient for them. When your center offers this option, it’s a competitive advantage for you over centers still relying on stacks of paperwork.
Procare Solutions gives you the eDocuments feature, which allows you and your families to electronically sign documents within Procare Online or via Procare Parent Engagement for Procare Desktop users.
Using eDocuments, you can create an electronic signature, format documents such as enrollment contracts and store signed documents in one central location and within the Procare platform. And it’s available through the Procare app!
This feature takes much of the hassle out of reminding parents and staff to complete their paperwork. You can prompt them to review documents by email, and they can digitally sign a document — no need to download, print, sign, then return to you.
Increase Retention With Parent Engagement
To maintain high enrollment in their centers, you must think hard about ways to keep your families happy so they don’t move their children to another center.
Millennials, who make up the majority of today’s parents, especially are seeking child care centers that use an app to give them push notifications and updates on what their children are doing, all day long.
They want to know exactly what their little ones are learning and doing, and they want to know immediately.
To keep them happy, and of course to attract new families, you need effective parent engagement – an intentional effort to build connections and form trusting relationships with families through regular updates and communication.
How is your child care center doing when it comes to keeping parents informed, connected and engaged? Take our parent engagement quiz to find out!
Procare’s parent engagement tool takes much of the work out of communicating and connecting with parents.
With Procare you can:
- Facilitate two-way conversations between your team and the parents you serve. All parents have to do is download the Procare app onto their phones.
- Share pictures and videos of daily activities, milestones achieved and more with parents in real time. That way parents don’t feel disconnected from their kids.
- Show parents what you’re teaching their kids while they’re at daycare. Doing so will give parents the insight they need to reinforce your lessons at home.
- Keep parents engaged with a center-wide calendar. With this feature, you’ll be able to promote upcoming events and remind parents of any approaching closures.
Interested in learning more about how Procare can help you grow enrollment at your center? Request a demo today!