How to make your daycare franchise successful in 2021

The advent of the pandemic took the childcare businesses around the world for a rollercoaster ride. While the year 2020 left many franchises grappling with the new circumstances, the year 2021 gave away several Covid trends that businesses could use as opportunities to adapt and thrive long-term.

This year we saw a shift in perspective from last year’s “What step should be taken next?” to “How to reach where we want to and where we should be?”. The process that went behind causing this shift wasn’t an easy one. It took a lot of patience, perseverance, and trial and error.

Let us look at the practices that helped daycare franchises worldwide successfully navigate the Covid era and enable them to achieve operational efficiency in the new normal.

Upping the communication game

Transparent, regular, and efficient communication has been crucial to the business of daycares regardless, but its importance has only drastically increased in recent times.

Communication could be the selling or breaking factor for daycare franchises during the pandemic. While excellent communication with parents could mean developing a level of trust and reliability, inefficiency in it could result in parents becoming alarmed and ultimately withdrawing their children from the institution.

One needs to establish a structured and coherent communication system in their daycares to notify parents of activities being held at the school, their kid’s timely updates, lesson plans, upcoming events, and other important highlights. In this scenario, a child care center software is recommended as it would help with streamlining all the communication processes.

Extending support to the staff

Teachers are pillars of any educational organization. But the work that teachers at daycare and preschools do is especially rewarding as it takes a lot of patience and resilience to do what they do daily.

In times like these, one needs to think beyond providing customer satisfaction and dispose themselves towards extending social-emotional support to their staff. Hence, it becomes crucial for daycares to step up and stand by their employees’ side in their time of need, providing them any comfort possible.

Deploying smart tools and systems

The only way to survive this wave of new normal is to adapt and grow with the curveballs it has thrown on us. Technology has become the backbone of most industries today and has single handily bore the shafts of businesses around the world during the pandemic. With everything becoming virtual, people day by day are not just getting accustomed to it, but are also getting comfortable with it.

Setting up systems that could support a virtual infrastructure has become pivotal for daycare businesses recently, and many of them are opting for preschool management apps. With parents working from home and staying engaged in meetings and calls all day, preschools need to step up their game in providing help with the learning process of the kids.

When technologically equipped with the right platform, such as daycare management software, daycares can manage and control all their activities from a single place, making it convenient for both teachers and parents to exchange and access information, while keeping track of the baby’s learning curve.

Adapting to the changes

Soon after the initial restrictions of the first phase of lockdown were uplifted, daycares around the world needed to figure out a way to be functional while also safeguarding the safety of both kids and their staff. With the disease being omnipresent, adapting to new changes to foolproof one’s center was imperative.

This list of changes for preschools choosing to continue functioning normally ranged from making it mandatory for everyone to wear masks at work, frequently sanitizing and disinfecting all surfaces and classrooms, arranging equipment for symptoms screening, and taking measures to practice social distancing.

On the other hand, to be on the safer side, several daycare franchises chose to go virtual with their day-to-day operations like most organizations and institutions globally. For them, the changes were mostly inclined on the technological side. This included setting up systems to enable remote learning, online payments, e-parent communication, digital attendance amongst other things. But luckily for them, and all the other daycare providers planning to go online with their businesses, all of this can be single-handedly managed with the help of all-inclusive preschool softwares.

Establishing trust and assuring safety

These times call for perceiving your pre-school management from the eyes of your customers. Assuring parents and gaining their trust is perhaps one of the major driving factors since Covid, and hence, it is crucial to understand what parents think of the daycare business and how can one alter and upgrade it to provide them the peace of mind they need.

One can look at this from a marketing and re-branding perspective as well. This would mean increasing the preschool’s online presence, making sure the branding and communication underline the safety factor to bolster the reassurance and trust.

What Illumine has to offer to preschools to help them adapt to the changes in market expectations and trends:

Safety & Compliance

Contactless Student & Staff Check-in

Illumine’s daycare attendance app lets you record the attendances of both staff and children digitally while having access to real-time teacher-student ratios.

Temperature Checks & Health Screens

Register temperatures digitally while entering and throughout the entire day as well. Easily pull health reports and share them with parents, all from the same place.

Customizable Medical Forms

Conveniently customize and configure medical forms for parents to document temperatures, medical declarations, and any health-related requests. All the requirements of a child are now accessible from a single platform.

Communication & Remote Learning

Lesson Planning & Sharing

Illumine enables teachers to build, track, and manage personalized learning plans for each kid. It also gives teachers an option of sharing these plans with parents and keeping them at par with the child’s growth.

Parent Submissions & Reminders

Illumine has an option for parents to submit the class assignments on behalf of the kids. It sends timely reminders to nudge when an assignment is due and enables them to discuss any doubts with the teacher.

In-app Virtual Classes

Illumine’s virtual classroom is an integrated and user-friendly platform that enables teachers to collaborate, share lessons and assignments, and standardize assessments with ease. With features like whiteboards, live screen sharing, and a platform that supports real-time uploading of documents of all formats, teachers are now empowered with tools that can help them make the learning experience for kids more impactful and interactive.

Sharing Videos & Assignments

Teachers can record any particular instruction or routine as videos and send it across to parents as references for them to do it with their kids.

Billing Management

Prepaid billing

Parents receive class credits which they can use as a token to invest in any class their kids show interest in. This allows them to only pay for classes they want their kid to opt for and timings convenient for them.

Online Payments & Reports

With Illumine’s billing software, all your billing processes are streamlined and automated and all your payments, invoices, and billing reports are digital.