Manual data collection was not sustainable

Since 1967, Southern Oregon Head Start has been offering free preschool and childcare to local families across southern Oregon. They’ve consistently grown to now operate 27 centers with over nearly 1,100 children. But with more families came an increase in time spent on data collection, which drained back office resources and reduced time to interact with children and families.

As the ERSEA Director, Kaycee has to track daily attendance across her entire organization and her team was collectively spending 150 hours each week manually recording and transmitting attendance data.

The manual process was time-consuming and the team knew it was time to find a better solution.

The solution must work instantly

Southern Oregon Head Start evaluated over 30 solutions before finding Playground. They were looking for a solution that wouldn't interrupt daily operations when initially implemented.

“We’re very, very data-driven and Playground has been essential to help us collect important data related to check-in and other parts of our daily operation,” said Kaycee.

Playground provides Southern Oregon Head Start with customizable check-in for families on center devices. Importantly, families are able to leave notes about the child during drop-off to replace their paper & pencil process. For families and on-site staff, the everyday attendance process was seamlessly replaced with Playground's digital solution.

Kaycee and her team gets real-time visibility into absences and have been able to dramatically reduce the time between an absence being marked on-site and the family being contacted.

Playground’s enterprise reporting allows Kaycee’s team to run attendance percentage reports across all 27 sites at once for any date range. These reports were custom built to show key metrics that her team is responsible for.

Southern Oregon Head Start replaced their digital form solution with Playground, further consolidating their family attendance and paperwork into one place.

It was also important to Kaycee that Playground provides her with the ability to assign roles & permissions with different levels of access to her team of 300+ staff.

Results: Turning manual paperwork & attendance collection into $6,000+ monthly savings

“We’ve probably saved the equivalent of two full-time employee salaries by automating and streamlining our manual processes,” said Kaycee.

As Playground helps Southern Oregon Head Start streamline their attendance and paperwork, they’ve emerged as a leading childcare organization in the nation.