“I was worried about how much a system for managing our club would cost and whether it would do what we needed without changing how we work. What we needed was a system that worked with our existing setup but took away as much of the admin as possible, without costing the earth. Kids Club HQ has proved to be very affordable and has made my life a lot easier! It’s dramatically cut the time we spend on admin and our parents now find it much easier to book.”
Michael Vinluan
FACE Holiday Club

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Plan to Help Parents Help Themselves, Now and into the New Year

In a child-centric environment, it is a well-known fact that the period between the end of October half-term and the start of the Christmas holidays is chaos with a capital C!

Children are worn out, what with Christmas play rehearsals and the promise of visiting Santa (not to mention him visiting them); parents are frazzled with everything they need to do, and sometimes all this can get in the way of what should be a fun, carefree time.

“The pressure for everything to be perfect can also add to tension, and prevent people from relaxing and having a nice time.” Action for Children

Meanwhile, childcare providers like you try to maintain the calm and rejuvenating environment that everyone’s come to expect for their kids.

So, we hate to sound like we’re adding to your plate here, but before Christmas is the perfect time to plan your communications as much as possible.

Why?

Because, especially during this hectic time, great communication leads to better relationships with your busy parents.

And better relationships lead to a more successful business.

Help them to help themselves (and help you)

We all know it’s a busy old time, but November through December is a great time to plan your upcoming communications and power up your comms and engagement strategy.

Not only will this nip any issues in the bud before they happen, but it will also show you to be the cool-as-a-cucumber childcare business that parents can rely on – now and into the New Year.

Being proactive with your key messages can:

  • Save admin time further down the line

  • Prevent parent anxiety

  • Provide education that leads to better autonomy

  • Allow you to plan your bookings and finances better

  • Allow everyone involved to transition smoothly between terms

Use your power of communication to educate your parents about anything from how to use Kids Club HQ’s booking system, what your terms and conditions are and how to plan effectively, and they’ll be happy for a long time to come.

What can you communicate?

The best topics to communicate are your most common enquiries and, let’s face it, your own bugbears. If people are asking the same questions or doing something wrong, the chances are they could do with some guidance!

Topics could include:

  • Cancellation policy

  • Payment terms

  • Block booking dos and don’ts

  • Waiting list procedure

  • Upcoming price increases

  • Perks and discounts

How can you communicate?

There are so many different ways of communicating – and you should do it more often than you think, too.

Despite feeling that you’ve emailed people plenty of times about your cancellation policy, busy parents might have missed it, forgotten they’d received it, not seen it (gone straight into their junk inbox), or maybe felt so overwhelmed that they didn’t read it at all!

So here are a few friendly, non-naggy ways of telling people what they need to know:

  • Add super-important stuff to email signatures

  • Make the most of auto-response messages

  • Social media (try and make it positive!)

  • Direct messaging – don’t forget to invite questions at the end

  • Automated messages from the Kids Club HQ system

  • Create a clearly written page on your website that you can always point to

  • Check your website for broken links or out-of-date information

  • Make a plan for the rest of the year and spread the messages evenly

And Kids Club HQ can help you in the following ways:

  • Segment parents/families by clubs attended, i.e. past Holiday Clubs, so you can target them for future clubs

  • Send bulk emails from the system with useful updates – while this function isn’t intended for marketing, you can add a link somewhere in your functional messages, encouraging bookings for upcoming Holiday Clubs or to highlight availability

  • Easily customise your T&Cs and consents

  • For new parents, you can encourage them to fill in the ‘where did you hear about us?’ field when they sign up, so you can track what’s leading people to book and inform future marketing efforts

If you’re happy with all that, try one step further

You could even head further into collaboration territory by swapping knowledge for free promotion!

Here are a few of our favourite ideas:

  • Share resources and expertise – provide vital information in exchange for parents’ support in promoting your club, like recommending you to friends or passing on flyers.

  • Workshops and training – offer to conduct workshops or training sessions for the staff or members of your partner organisations. This is a great way to get to know your parents, and they will appreciate the human touch.

  • Facility use – share your club’s facilities for community events or partner activities. This will make you an even more valuable part of the community and will improve relationships, which, in turn, improves the flow of your business.

Don’t forget to measure your success!

There’s not really much point in putting all this effort into your communications without knowing how well you’ve smashed it. But there’s more than one way to measure success.

Here are five effective ways to do this:

  1. Track how well clubs are doing – take a look at registration numbers versus capacity for each club on your Kids Club HQ dashboard. This should determine how well clubs are doing, how hard you have to push marketing to fill different locations, and whether there are other issues to address.

  2. Send feedback forms – include questions about how easy or hard people find it to understand your policies and procedures, as well as how new members heard about your club

  3. Hold regular reviews – if you’ve held an information swap event, schedule regular reviews with your partners to evaluate the success of your collaborations and tweak anything you need to.

  4. Track other stats – your communications success can also show up in other places, so track numbers like social media likes, email opens, time spent on your website and more

  5. Hold a focus group – plan a cosy get together (tea and biscuits essential!) with parents, partners and your club team to discuss your impact and make potential improvements. Make notes, of course, but make sure you listen – sometimes true feelings can pop out randomly!

Avoid unnecessary stress this Christmas!

The run-up to Christmas is crazy and can leave everyone feeling frazzled – but it’s actually the best time to strengthen your comms game. If you can create and stick to a solid communication strategy, you will help parents help themselves. This saves time, effort and money, and makes life easier for your parents at a time they need it most.

There are many ways to communicate your key messages, from sending direct emails, posting on social media and tailoring automated messages to embedding info in your email signatures. You can also go a step further by creating cross-promotion opportunities and resource sharing to encourage better communication and, therefore, better relationships.

Kids Club HQ features can make your strategy super specific, too, like when you filter groups of parents so they only receive news about the clubs they book with, or finding out how parents found you, so that you can use the most successful method in future campaigns.

Once you’re done, don’t forget to measure your success and take on board any learnings for next time around.

The key to success is all in the planning, so the only thing in a flap this Christmas is the turkey!