3 Key Systems to Help You Focus on Growing Your Enrollment
Summer is officially here and in full swing! For some of us, we have summer camps and special events happing, others take the summer off. Which ever mode your early childhood business is in at the moment… one thing is certain, fall is right around the corner.
It is time to start thinking about your plan for fall. Yes, the first day of school is 6-7 weeks away, however, taking a moment to strategize your plan for fall will pay of in more enrollments, happier team members, and controlled chaos.
We have kicked off our Back to School Challenge this week. 6 weeks in 6 days to help you get your program full this fall. The Early Childhood Business Made Easy podcast is spending the next 6 weeks focused on this Back to School Challenge. We are going to spend the next 6 weeks together reviewing many of the key strategies and systems that will help you be successful.
We will be covering:
Systems You Should Be Using
Empowering Your Team
Marketing Strategies
Open House Prep
Team Meeting Overview
Operations Checklist
Follow along each week with the resource packed workbook we created for you to use loaded with weekly checklists for marketing and operations, fill-in worksheets, and to-do lists. All to get you in the CEO mindset of preparing your early childhood business today to be ready to fill with enrollments this fall.
This is WEEK 6 of the Back to School Challenge and we are talking all about systems. We will dive in to the 3 Key Systems to Help you Focus on Growing Your Enrollment.
A.C.E. Inquiry System. Attraction Communication Enrollment
Pre-Registration System
Fall Enrollment Registration Tracking System
A.C.E. Inquiry System. Attraction Communication Enrollment
As you know, it's important to keep track of all the children who are registered for your programs. This helps you to ensure that you have enough space and resources for everyone, that no child is left out, and you have the team ready to support them.
It is important to make sure you have a process or system for tracking inquiring families. But the part of this process that generates profit is when you over communicate with your potential family. There are several steps to ensure this and the A.C.E. Inquiry System helps you do just that.
The first piece to this system is Attraction. This is where you have put in place the key assets that will attract potential families to you. Things like your website, social media, public relations, community involvement, all of the things that will cause you to be noticed and attract families to your program.
We will go over Attraction in more detail when we get to week 4 of the Back to School Challenge. That is when we will talk all about marketing.
The second piece is the most detailed and that is Communication. Again, when you over communicate you over deliver in customer service. You make life a little easier for today’s busy parents. In future podcasts we go into each of these in more detail. For today, we are going to review the steps involved in ensuring you over communicate and provide high quality customer service that turns into an enrollment.
And the final piece of our A.C.E. Inquiry System is Enrollment. This is the process of setting up your new family. You can create a file for each new child or you can have an online tracking system, but which ever you use, be sure you gather all of the required information needed from your local licensing agency. They have specific things they require for you to keep on file. I go into more detail about some of the things we do when enrolling a new child in this episode when we talk about your Fall Enrollment Registration Tracking System.
Pre-Registration System
Every January we begin the process of enrolling for fall of the next school year. This system begins with communicating with existing families to understand what their fall plans are. After we communicate with them, we open it up to the public.
January - ask current families to respond in writing if they will be attending in the summer, fall or are they done in June
They secure their place by paying their annual registration fee in January
Those that are returning are added to our Fall 20XX Enrollment Registration Tracking System
We ask for their requested schedules at a different time
We now know which classroom look like we will be having openings for
February - we open to public enrollment and add specific schedule request to the waitlist if it looks full
We remind current families of our referral program and ask them to spread the word
We ask returning families to submit their requested days and times
March - ask current families to submit their plans for summer specifically with their requested schedule during June, July and August
April - is the deadline for current families to have secured their Fall and/or Summer schedule
May - new families can now choose their preferred schedule and we open the waitlist
June - we hand out or email any new school year paperwork to current and planned fall families and have most of back before the school year is over
Fall Enrollment Registration Tracking System
The Fall Enrollment Registration Tracking System begins with setting a goal for your fall enrollment. It should include tracking the current weeks planned enrollment as you work towards that goal. It also includes tracking your inquiries and follow up responses to the inquiries.
This is the system we follow every summer to get our building ready for a fabulous fall. After they enroll, we have all of the students listed on a spreadsheet so we can be tracking our fall enrollment numbers.
This spreadsheet serves double duty for us. It also includes the important things we need done for each student. We include things like:
Name
Parents
Paid annual registration fee
Tuition set up in our system
Paid annual supply fee
Paid snack fee
Cubby label
Owl assigned
Mailbox created and labled
Added to classroom birthday board
If appropriate, added to hot lunch list
There are a few more specific ones to our schools but you get the idea. This is a living, breathing document that we add to all summer until every child is ready. And it lets us track our numbers throughout the summer.
I discuss all of this in more depth in the episode above, so make sure to give it a listen!
Talking Points
Key Strategies and Systems that will help you be sucessful this fall. (01:38)
A.C.E. Inquiry System (04:16)
Steps involved in ensuring you over communicate and provide high quality customer service that turns into an enrollment. (06:40)
Pre-Registration System (09:43)
Fall Enrollment Registration Tracking System (11:46)