Building close childcare center relationships with the families of children who attend your childcare center is one of the biggest investments you can make in improving your childcare business.
Closer childcare center relationships create better experiences for children – helping improve their overall experience, as well as their progress towards developmental milestones, building of social skills, and overall happiness.
But healthy relationships with families are also a huge positive for your business. Happy parents can’t wait to tell everyone about your amazing childcare center, and will recommend you to their colleagues, friends, and families, bringing you new customers.
On the face of it, building healthy relationships with families might seem easy. But there’s some steps you can take to go to the next level and stand apart from other childcare centers in your area. Here’s the seven best ways for childcare centers to stand apart:
#1 High-Quality Customer Service
Your teachers and care providers are the face of your business, and it’s important they demonstrate high-quality customer service skills in order to build lasting relationships with families. Even before technological advances started providing smoother solutions, teachers knew they needed to:
- Be engaging
- Communicate clearly
- Always share the good
- Gently share the challenges
- Check in consistently with parents
These days, providing high-quality customer service is more important than ever. Parents expect a seamless, professional experience. Using technological solutions helps build closer relationships with parents by giving them more visibility of their child’s day. Using technology to communicate also frees your staff to spend more time with the children, so everyone’s a winner.
#2 Share Children’s Accomplishments
When parents get more information on a regular basis, their ability to support their child increases. Let’s take an example of something children do all the time at childcare: art projects!
Teachers can share artwork with parents by sending it home, but often, the child’s art gets displayed on the walls, is a temporary creation, or is the work of a team of several child geniuses! Instead of sending children home with their masterpiece, consider having teachers take a picture of the artwork and share it with parents. If you like, go one step further, and create a digital portfolio that collates everything in an online gallery
Once the child heads home for the day, families are able to have exciting, stimulating conversations with their child about their masterpiece – even if they don’t have the artwork in front of them. This creates a stronger, healthier bond, and also makes families feel more involved in their child’s experiences at your childcare center.
#3 Reduce Parent Anxiety
Parents love getting consistent updates from their child’s teacher about what their child is up too. Children are the center of every parent’s universe, and many parents have anxiety about leaving their child at a daycare center. Whether it’s getting used to being apart from their first-born child for the first time, or worrying about behavioural issues, that anxiety is only natural.
Short, simple updates go a long way to reducing this anxiety.
Whether it’s sharing the child’s work, photos of them playing, or an update on what they had for lunch, quick, frequent updates can dramatically increase a parent’s level of trust in you as a childcare provider. Parents will wonder less about what’s going on with their child when they know what they’re up to at key times during the day.
#4 Create a Secure Environment
Every childcare provider has to pay attention when it comes to child pickup and drop off. This has always been an important issue, but it’s become more so in the past year as childcare providers do everything they can to ensure a COVID-safe environment.
Families are trusting you with the most important thing in their world––their child––so it’s vital you do everything you can to create a safe, clean environment that minimizes risks.
One way of doing this is by introducing a touchless sign-in that lets parents check their child in using a QR code or a unique PIN. This ensures that only approved people are able to collect the child from your center.
You might also consider taking extra measures including a COVID-19 screening survey that parents must take before checking their child in to your center.
#5 Bridge the Gap Between Home and School
Previously, parent-teacher communication occurred mostly around events like parent-teacher conferences, field trips, or even just a quick chat while picking up lost and found items.
But by making an effort to build closer relationships, parents, teachers, and even children can have a much better experience.
Children can see positive support happening on a daily basis between the two most important areas of their life: home and childcare. And together, parents and teachers can find ways to help the child grow and blossom by identifying development areas.
Frequent communication is the best way to bridge this gap and create positive childcare center relationships. Communication between parents and teachers on a regular basis goes a long way to building lasting, long-term relationships. There are a variety of online communication platforms custom-built for childcare centers. Our advice: look for services with a secure messaging system and customizable shared activity log that teachers can use to easily share quick updates on daily activities.
#6 Made Paperwork a Breeze
Nobody likes doing paperwork. Whether it’s filling out daily sheets, tracking attendance, or sending out newsletters, we know you’d rather be spending quality time with the children instead of being stuck in the office.
You’re not alone. Parents aren’t big fans of paperwork either – often, it’ll just end up at the bottom of a pile of mail, or land in the trash.
Simplify the process for everyone and start sharing important documents and information with parents digitally.
You’ll make life easier for parents, ensure your important updates get read, and dramatically reduce your spending on paper and ink, potentially saving you hundreds or even thousands of dollars per year.
#7 Use Daily Connect
The most successful childcare businesses use technology to support child development and parent-teacher relationships, which in turn bolsters their reputation as a quality childcare business.
You want technology that’s easy to use, inexpensive, and takes care of the hard work for you, so you can spend more time with children and parents and focus on growing your business. Daily Connect is a simple yet powerful software platform that enables childcare centers to effectively communicate with parents.
There are a range of features to support closer relationships with families, and an easy-to-use app that can be used by parents and teachers alike. Daily Connect is customizable to the needs of your childcare center, and prices start from just $8.99/mo.
If you want to learn more about using technology to build better relationships with the families at your childcare center, schedule your free demo of Daily Connect today