Building connections with your families and your staff is critical to establishing and keeping trust and loyalty.

Once you lose these things, it’s almost impossible to regain them.

As part of Procare’s Six C’s of Connection blog series, we’ll outline below a few ways that Procare helps you connect with the families you serve! 

Connect Through the Procare Family Communication App

With a fully integrated and complete family engagement solution that includes classroom management, the Procare child care mobile app allows parents to be immersed in their children’s day-to-day activities ⁠— that includes tracking developmental milestones, sharing photos and videos as well as enabling two-way communication.

This daycare parent communication app saves child care programs time and money by streamlining core administrative functions while providing easy-to-access portals and the ability for real-time updates from the classroom.

Centers can create and send invoices to parents easily. They also can manage all billing transactions, payments, refunds and credits from the app.

The app allows parents to make online payments — from a checking or savings account, or a debit or credit card — to your center. It also gives parents a viewable list of transactions. That’s especially important now, when about 9,000 babies are born to millennial parents each day … and a recent study showed that HALF of millennials have never used a check! 

Centers can bill parents based on hourly attendance using information gleaned from the app.

Parents can see their child’s activities that are shared by your teachers. This lets families see what their children are doing and learn what’s happening in their day, including when and how long they napped, what they ate, in addition to videos and learning updates.

In just the past two years, centers have shared half a billion activities with parents using the Procare family communication app!

The app records student attendance and the transfers of kids to different rooms. It also records parents’ signatures and captures answers on a drop-off form that give teachers important information.

And it helps centers stay compliant with licensing regulations on staff-to-student ratios, which are tracked in real time from the app for rooms in a center.

The Procare Solutions eDocuments feature, which is available on the app, gives centers a solution to create, send, review and store digital documents. It’s a way to digitize a significant part of workflows that too often rely on pen and paper by allowing centers to send and manage all sorts of documents, including enrollment contracts, incident reports, permission slips and more. 

Share Newsletters and Send Texts

The ability to share information with parents about what’s happening in your child care program is essential. They want to know what activities are coming up, and an easy way to communicate this information to help busy families make plans is through Procare’s newsletter function.

You can choose to send your newsletter by email to every family who is enrolled in your early childhood education center, or narrow it to a class. Here’s another example: you could customize even further who would get the newsletter, such as only the families of children with food allergies who may need specific dietary information.

The same is true for text messages. You can text individual people or send a group text (known as bulk texting) to many people at once. This is especially helpful when you need to close your center or program, such as for a snow day, or if there’s an unexpected problem with your building such as an electricity or water outage.

Procare also gives staff and families the ability to  view upcoming schedules and calendars! 

Connect and Track Check-ins and Checkouts

Procare’s integrated technology allows families and your staff to use QR codes and/or GPS technology for a completely touch-free child care check-in and check-out process. 

Families can check in their children using the Procare app without entering your building or by scanning a code once inside.

Each school and child care center uses a unique QR code that can be displayed on a tablet, computer, smartphone or printed on paper and displayed at your daycare. 

When parents or other family members arrive, they simply pull up the Procare app on their phone, select the QR code icon and scan. After scanning the code, the parent will be able to check in their child directly from their phone. 

Procare’s technology allows your teachers and other staff to sign in and sign out easily and quickly using a tablet at your center or their own phone.

Timecards automatically are updated, which frees up your time spent on a mundane administrative task.

You can get rid of stacks of paper time sheets that need to be tallied by hand and manually entered into your system. This feature for staff sign-ins and sign-outs saves you time that you can spend elsewhere in your center!

Relying on paper sheets to record when children are dropped off and picked up just doesn’t work anymore. It makes these times of day too chaotic and it doesn’t give you the information you need to adhere to staff-to-child ratios in real time.

Share Classroom Activities and Development Milestones

Use Procare’s integrated state early learning standards to simplify your lesson planning and milestone tracking! 

Research indicates that family engagement in early childhood education promotes student achievement and growth. It also helps parents feel confident about their child’s education and the direction in which they are moving. When parents can easily see which areas their child might be behind in, they are more likely to help their child in these subjects at home.

WIth Procare, you can create daily activities that can then be shared with parents and connect those activities to state standards.

You can apply state early learning standards to lesson plans to ensure each domain that’s covered in the classroom can be recorded as observations. You also can track specific events that contribute to a child’s development against a standard.

Procare gives families access to multiple reports including family and child information, family accounting, meal tracking, attendance tracking, activity management and more. You can proactively provide them with information they usually must request. 

You can compile reports on each student’s development to easily see their progress and share with parents, and use Procare’s customizable learning frameworks to input your domains, sub-domains and milestones — all of which can be assigned to ages or categories!

How Procare Can Help!

How engaged and connected with your families are you? Take our quiz to find out!

A strong focus on family engagement helps build connections with the families you serve, and their word-of-mouth advertising is invaluable in helping you grow your enrollment and revenue.

Two out of three child care businesses that use management software choose Procare. We’d love to show you why. 

Request a demo today to see for yourself how Procare can help you make connections in your daycare!