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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Classroom Forecasting – Sunny with a Chance of Savings!
Would you like to know how many teachers you need in a classroom in the future? Perhaps you want to predict an upcoming vacancy in the Butterflies room? Using the schedule reporting features of Procare Software® you can be your own Carnac the Magnificent and “divine the answer…” !
Setting Up Schedules
First you’ll want to enter your Classroom Ratios. Then you’ll set up Child Schedules and Employee Schedules as well – in order to forecast accurate staffing needs to meet your child/teacher ratios. You can even use multi-line day schedules if children or employees switch rooms during the day, like a preschooler scheduled in the preschool room from 8:30 am to 11:30 am who then moves to the Bluebirds room from 11:30 am to 4:30 pm.
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
Child Care Registration Fees
A hot topic leading up to the start of the school year is how to handle registration and enrollment fees for your child care, daycare, preschool or similar place of early childhood learning. Luckily, ProCare makes it easy to record registration fees in a variety of ways depending on how registration works at your child care business. Continue reading
Up to Date Enrollment Reports
Child care centers, daycare facilities, preschool and after school programs all need to keep up to date enrollment reports. Sometimes it’s even desirable to print a report showing historic enrollment, in other words, the number of children enrolled in a past period. This can be useful to establish staffing trends and to compare enrollment over periods of time. Another reason to run enrollment reports may be to satisfy Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP) requirements showing the number of children enrolled at various reimbursement levels. Continue reading