Enrollment is essential to running a successful business. And without enough children enrolled in their programs, paying the bills and keeping your doors open becomes a real challenge. So attracting new families to grow enrollment is a key part of operating your business.
Let’s look at some tips to boost your enrollment and how Procare can help!
A Look at Enrollment Data
Ensuring a steady stream of enrolled children is a key factor that contributes to the overall success of a center. Yet the 2024 Child Care Management Software Industry Trends Report from Procare Solutions found that 47% of centers are struggling with enrollment, up from 36% the year before.
Additionally, 33% of centers say they are under capacity, which is down from the previous year:
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.
With Procare, you can generate tours, schedule phone calls and automatically schedule follow-ups and email reminders with families who’ve expressed an interest in your center.
Lead Insights 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, through a pipeline and funnel.
The pipeline table provides a snapshot of leads by status and allows you to compare data for two dates at a time.
And the funnel table displays how leads move through the lead process, which includes the percentage of leads that convert from one status to the next (such as from toured to waitlisted) and the average time a lead spends in each status.
Check out our Leads Insights support page to learn more how this feature can help you grow your business!
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.
Using eDocuments, you can create an electronic signature, format documents such as enrollment contracts and store signed documents in one central location and within Procare. And it’s available through the Procare child care mobile 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 Family 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 family 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 family engagement quiz to find out!
Procare’s family engagement capabilities take much of the work out of communicating and connecting with parents, which is easy with the child care mobile app.
With Procare you can:
- Facilitate two-way conversations between your team and the families you serve. All parents have to do is download the Procare child care mobile 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 families 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 families 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!
