Managing opportunities to grow your enrollment is critical to running a successful child care business.
You must have a deep understanding of how effective you are at enrolling families who show an interest in your center as well as the popularity, and openings, in extra-curricular programs you offer.
Procare Solutions is pleased to offer two new updates — the Programs and Insights tools — to help your center achieve your goals while giving more flexibility in what offerings you can provide your families.
Let’s take a look at each feature with some examples for what they can do for you!
Programs Feature Gives More Options
The Programs feature allows your early childhood education center or school to create custom programs and events, as well as expand offerings for enrollment that aren’t tied to a specific room.
It streamlines how parents register their children for a special program that comes with a cost beyond tuition. That means you can go beyond Procare’s Rooms feature to take advantage of more possibilities to bring in more revenue from the program … that’s because parents can sign their kids up for multiple time slots, multiple rooms and in multiple programs!
Programs can be assigned to one or more rooms and rooms can host one or more programs.
So let’s say you decide to offer a dance class as a program on different days and in different rooms. Designate dance as the program using the Programs feature and assign the program to multiple rooms. This simplifies the process for a families who wants to enroll a 2-year-old and a 4-year-old, who are in different rooms, into the same dance program. As you enroll students, you will be able to track openings and scheduled days and parts of days using Insights.
Such flexibility is especially important to millennial parents, the largest group of parents in the country who are digitally native and number more than 22 million in the U.S., with about 9,000 babies born to them each day, according to a recent TIME article.
Being able to accommodate families with multiple children is something your center must be equipped to do. And it’s easy for you to assign staff to the program!
Programs have a title, optional start and end date, as well as a room and weekly schedule:
Don’t worry if you rely on the Rooms feature as part of your Procare package — it’s not going away! Instead, Rooms will begin to be used more to manage physical locations while Programs will be the tool for managing the actual offerings that occur in the rooms.
Rooms become just a physical location and the programs represent the actual class — the enrollment opportunity! — being offered.
Administrators can create programs as templates that can be used to easily build out future programs and events. These details carry over, saving you time as you build out schedules.
Insights Feature Gives You Enrollment Information
Attracting new families is a key part of operating a successful child care business. To do that well, you need to know how effective you are at enrolling families who show an interest in your center.
The new Insights feature from Procare allows your center to see what the enrollment is in a room and/or program, as well as identify areas that have open capacity. It also highlights which offerings need additional staff to remain compliant with ratio requirements.
With this information readily available to you, your center can plan for the future by knowing what your enrollment will look like with children who are graduating and new families that are coming in.
You will know which programs are in highest demand and what openings are available for interested families.
Being able to view enrollment statuses and create your own customer pipeline allows you to anticipate staffing needs and forecast revenue to help plan for your business’s needs and development!
Insights will allow your daycare to recognize what to expect for registration, income and staff so you have a better sense of how your business is performing and make informed decisions to meet your goals.
How These Tools Work Together to Work for Your Center
Programs and Insights work together to give Procare centers the ability to create custom programs and enrollment opportunities. Check out this support page for more details and a video tutorial!
As an administrator, you will have more options to create unique schedules that enable you to enroll children into more classes and programs! Plus, you get a clear view of your enrollment, staffing needs and open programs.
Don’t wait to start planning for your future. Request a demo today and learn more about our end-of-year promotion to get Procare free for two months!
