Prospective families always pay attention to the curriculum and other services childcare centres offer before deciding to apply for enrollment. However, with the current COVID-19 situation, parents also are concerned with how your centre is following health guidelines and what safety measures you have in place. Thus, you may want to rebrand certain things in order to cater towards the current situation. Not only will it provide a message to prospective families, but also to current families enrolled at your centre.
1. Revise your handbook to include COVID-19 focused information
Changing your handbook to include information related to COVID-19 is an important and necessary step that all centres should take. Then, the handbook should be posted on the centre’s website. That way, parents can easily access the newly changed information whenever they need to.
2. Allow Virtual Tours
Tours in person may not be easy or isn’t an option that your centre offers yet. But by using virtual platforms like Zoom or Facetime, you can offer a real-time, virtual tour of your centre. This allows parents to still get the experience of walking through your centre and asking questions while staying safe.
You should also have a pre-recorded professional video tour of your centre that you can post on your website, YouTube, or provide to parents. The video will be a tour of your centre and could include what the day will look like with the new safety precautions and health guidelines in place.
Not all prospective parents have the time to do a virtual tour in real time, so this is a great solution to offer. The video can also be shown to current families who have children enrolled in your centre. This added visual with the revised handbook allows parents to see how the centre has changed due to COVID-19.
3. Include Health and Safety in your Lesson Plans
Educating the children at your centre is a great way to inform them about the importance of proper hygiene and cleanliness, especially now. Lessons could include how to properly wear a mask, the importance of social distancing, and also stressing the importance of handwashing. Parents could also see that you understand the severity of the situation and how important it is for children, especially those at a younger age, to learn about these key practices.
4. Add information of safety procedures and precautions to your website and other social media
When current or prospective families go to your centre’s website or access your informative documents, having a section dedicated to COVID-19 can translate to parents how detailed you want to be. You can add photos of what your centre will look like with the new guidelines in place, as well as what your staff members will look like while wearing PPE. These visuals can show how you will be following your city’s and town’s guidelines.
Your social media can also be a place where you can post tips on how parents can keep themselves and their children safe and healthy. For example, you can post a list of activities that children can do to keep them entertained while being inside. This will communicate to parents that you care about their well-being.
These are changes that don’t all need to be made at once. It can be overwhelming to implement these changes at the same time, so going through these suggestions one at a time is a good way to avoid that. By adding these few changes, childcare centres like yours can greatly benefit from them as you are catering your branding towards the current situation and looking at what parents are concerned about.