Shelley M. Spliethof
How to Track Daycare Marketing & Enrollment
With the current economy, maintaining a stable and profitable enrollment base, as well as an updated and active waiting list, are key ingredients to the prosperity of your child care, daycare or preschool. Maintaining records to track the success of various advertising campaigns, new contacts generated, referral sources, and how many contacts move on to become customers, are all important ingredients to successful growth.
In today’s post, we’ll take a look at using Procare Software® to track these items so owners and directors can reliably see results.
Track Marketing Sources
Procare includes a very powerful database that can accomplish a wide variety of tasks, extending way beyond the scope of daily child care management. One of these is a Customer Relationship Management database, or CRM.
Set Up Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Create the marketing items you wish to track. From Procare Home screen go to Configuration > System > Database Management > Tracking Items & User Defined Fields. See: How to Set Up Tracking 
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Cool Kid Activities for Indoor Summer Fun
Beat the Summer Heat with Creative Indoor Activities
During the summer months, I talk to a lot of child care center owners and directors who live in warmer climates and tell me that some days are so hot they have to keep the children inside to avoid dehydration. I can’t imagine how hard that would be for kids when the sun is shining but it’s just not safe to play outside. In Oregon, our kids don’t go out when it rains but then again, who wants to anyway.
Keeping kids indoors all day can drive both adults and children stir crazy. The reprieve of running around and blowing off steam helps keep children better focused while in the classroom and not having that outlet can be difficult.
As a mother, I run into this with my own 6 year old. Too many hours without exercise or projects can be a source of frustration for both her and I. Here’s a list of projects that have fared well for our family in keeping our daughter happy and well occupied. Continue reading
Summer is here! Summer is here!
Now is the time to streamline
pre-registration, scheduling and forecasting of your enrollment and revenue.
If there were a town crier, he’d be excitedly running through the streets yelling, “Summer is coming! Summer is coming!” And it is… finally! We are beginning to see it everywhere: longer days, brighter skies, blooming flowers and for us in childcare, the management of summer and fall pre-registration.
For all of us in the child care industry, we are consistently preparing for the season ahead. Managing what’s going on now while predicting what will be coming up is a tall order and it certainly keeps everyone on their toes this time of year.
Procare Software® offers exciting new features designed to help early childhood administrators improve and streamline the process of pre-registration, scheduling and forecasting enrollment and revenue for future sessions so that centers can run profitably at full capacity. Continue reading
Preschool & Sleeping Pills Don’t Mix
An interesting and scary thing happened in our family recently and I thought it important to share.
As with any morning, I got up and went downstairs to make lunch for my preschooler, Sofia, and to feed the dogs. When I opened her lunch box, down at the bottom was a single pill with the word TEVA on one side and 74 on the other. I looked up the pill and it was an Ambien sleeping pill.
I asked her how she got the pill and where it came from. She told me that it came from one of her friends at school (whom I have never heard of). Continue reading
Marketing Dollars & Your Child Care Business
In a time when saving money on expenses is important, many child care business owners have started to take a closer look at the return on their marketing dollars.
Procare Software® can help both simplify the daily management of your center and keep your fingers on the pulse of your child care marketing efforts by allowing you to track and analyze the success of your marketing sources. For instance, let’s say in the last month you received 25 inquiries from your Yellow Pages ad but only 5 of those toured your center and 2 actually enrolled. Many people might say the Yellow Pages advertising is working well for them because they had 25 inquiries. On the other hand, your website yielded 15 new inquiries, 10 of those prospective families took a tour and 8 became new clients. Which provided you the greatest return on your investment? The website clearly had a much higher rate of new enrollment and, depending on the actual cost of each ad, it likely had a lower cost per lead as well. Continue reading