Any child care provider knows that a thriving daycare center is one with a strong staff, invested families, and a welcoming environment for children to grow and thrive. However, that’s not all you’ll need to succeed, especially with the sheer amount of administrative work needed just to keep your daycare standing.

In this article, we’ll walk you through how to run a successful daycare center, including several best practices and solutions. See how strategic childcare management can facilitate business growth, enrich parent communication, and give you the space to focus on what you do best: keeping your kids happy, healthy, and engaged. 

Is opening a daycare worth it?

Put plainly, yes! Working parents rely on all types of daycares for their children, and not only for their work hours. Families use child care services to meet other demands, such as attending their own outings, events, and even emergencies. Research on global daycare services reveals a growing market—childcare is a lucrative and in-demand business. 

If you’re just starting, there are some basic steps to take care of: getting your license, getting all the appropriate insurance coverage, and writing a business plan. 

Requirements and regulations can vary among states. Look for your state to find information on daycare license requirements by finding your state’s licensing agency, regulations, and additional standards for child care centers. To protect your business, it’s also important to get the following coverage for your daycare: liability insurance, property insurance, and malpractice insurance.

Writing a business plan helps you lay out a framework for your daycare center, making note of the logistics of your facility like location, required materials, and so on. Decide your pricing, operational hours, child capacity, and age range of kids. You also want to develop your value proposition: what is the unique strength of focus of your daycare? What solution is your daycare providing? For example, you might want to provide a space and activities for children to learn through social engagement. 

Consider employment by identifying the kind of staff you are looking for, including preferred years of work experience in related fields. Writing up a job description for job postings can help you begin gathering hireable staff.

How to run a daycare center: 10 best practices

Getting your daycare established will take some time, but it’ll be a rewarding business as long as your foundation is solid. If you want your daycare center to be the best it can be, though, check out some of our recommended best practices.

Establish clear policies and business goals with staff

Keep your goal in mind to make sure that your decisions align with the daycare center you want to create. Taking our earlier example, if you want to improve learning with social engagement, the activities you offer should be centered around communication, empathy, and conflict resolution. Once your staff is unified under the same vision and guidelines, you can work together towards achieving your goals more efficiently. 

Creating a handbook with clearly stated guidelines can help you frame and communicate your expectations to your staff. Jot down your mission statements, staff policies and procedures, health and safety expectations, professional and ethical conduct, and expectations around communicating with children and families. During staff onboarding, ensure staff members understand guidelines completely with a handbook assessment.

Invest in your staff

You must invest in the quality of your staff. Consider the skills, practices, and content you want your team to focus on for long-term growth. Provide regular training in a variety of areas, from supporting kids’ social-emotional growth to delivering trauma-informed instruction.
Providing your staff with ongoing cost-effective professional development opportunities is a meaningful way to invest in the team. Professional development can come in synchronous or asynchronous forms: readings, courses, webinars, and more. Ask your staff for input on which topics or mediums would most benefit them. Some of your staff might be working towards certain credentials or educational licenses, and you should facilitate that by covering their license expenses.

Improving staff management also means finding solutions for tracking time and running pay without error. Playground offers payroll capabilities complete with scheduling and time tracking features—easily track professional development activities and ensure they’re reflected in staff pay.

Go digital with your paperwork

Going paperless increases the overall efficiency of a daycare facility, and efficiency supports success. Going digital cuts out the time it takes both you and your families to print, organize, submit, and maintain documents. Paperless also offers new ways to streamline your center with digital solutions like drag-and-drop file uploaders, autofill capabilities, e-signature requests, etc. Plus, investing in children’s well-being also means investing in a greener future for them. 

Looking to eliminate the work from paperwork? Playground's all-in-one system provides a platform that lets your parents easily submit important documents, minimizing the time you spend on organization and maximizing the time you spend interacting with and creating positive spaces for children, staff, and families. 

Streamline your enrollment process

One of the biggest barriers to daycare growth is the complicated nature of enrollment. Enrollment is overwhelming for staff, surely, but it’s arguably more overwhelming for parents signing on for services. Thus, removing the seams from your enrollment process can make scaling your business a reality.

Consolidating enrollment into a single dashboard rather than several incongruous spreadsheets is the first and best step. Playground’s drag-and-drop enrollment dashboard makes it easy to move families along the pipeline and keep track of their approval status. 

With Playground, parents don’t need to wade through arduous admin processes to get their children started with services. They can enroll right from their mobile device, pay any enrollment fees directly, and eSign necessary documents. On your end, it’s easy to send automated enrollment updates and adjust class schedules for new applicants.

Showcase your center with an amazing website

When parents look for daycares, they’ll go looking for your website first. This first impression tells the family about your organization’s mission, credibility, and accessibility. Their mind is focused on how safe and welcoming your center is for their child; if your website leaves them uncertain, they may be discouraged from contacting you. 

To grab the attention and trust of parents, use your website to showcase your team, your mission statement, and your values. Display photos of your center that give them the impression of the physical and social atmosphere. Make sign-up and contact information visible, as well as any basic information like cost, area, and availability. 

For a friendly and intuitive website, using Playground’s interface lets you easily build a strong first impression and even optimizes ranking in search engines, increasing traffic on your site. It’s mobile responsive, meaning that its design and performance are adjusted for those who find your website through their phones rather than a computer.

Market yourself well, especially on social media

Beyond building a website, there are several different ways to promote your daycare center: flyers, newspaper ads, emails, and social media. Observe how neighboring daycares market themselves, and consider connecting with them. Since daycares are in high demand and can so often be filled, parents are going to want backup. Another established daycare can help inform their parents with any flyers you create. 

Social media is a goldmine for daycare marketing. Creating a social media page gives you ways to not only increase your internet presence but also allow friends, family, and community members to further your marketing by sharing your account and posts. It’s also a repository for photos from your activities and events, and this timeline of experiences increases your authority as a daycare provider.

When you market your daycare online effectively, you support your enrollment KPIs.

Maintain a safe, clean, friendly space for the children

Keeping your daycare facility safe and clean while ensuring a friendly atmosphere is essential. Safety includes setting up your policies, procedures, and materials for emergencies. Find age-appropriate toys, and create organizational systems for materials that make cleaning the space easier for staff. You can even make cleaning a part of the children’s routine as an important life skill. 

When it comes to safety, food allergies are vital to consider. Promoting a clean environment and informing your kids about allergies prevents many emergencies from occurring. The last thing you want is to be the cause of an extreme allergic reaction. 

Rug areas and open spaces can help expand the atmosphere and make your room more flexible for different activities. Soft-colored posters and a dedicated quiet area for kids who need to self-regulate can help create a friendlier space overall. 

Prioritize regular parent communications

Earning and maintaining the trust of parents is easier to achieve by regularly communicating with them. Parents prefer to know that their child is safe, tended to, eating properly, and having positive social experiences. Frequent communication helps alleviate worries that parents have and helps build trust between the families and your staff. 

As a daycare provider, though, ease of communication with families is imperative to success. Distributing information among a community of hard-pressed parents is no easy task, but there are solutions that can help.

Playground lets you easily communicate with parents individually or in groups. You can send photos, videos, and updates on eating and potty activities. This goes for announcements, too. Easily schedule out important information to be distributed through SMS, email, and in-app notifications. 

Elevate your daily child care services

Beyond regular daycare services, you may offer other helpful child care services, like education and mentorship. Expanding your services can help you grow your business to new heights while serving families more comprehensively. For example, drop-in child care is an as-needed service that allows parents who need last-minute childcare to schedule care immediately. These additional services act as value-adds for your daycare.

Manage your daycare finances effectively

As your business grows and reaches more families, you’ll benefit from having systems to better manage your billing, expenses, and payroll. Digitized, automated payments make tracking finances easier, and payments become more intuitive for parents. The easier you can make payment on the parents’ end, the fewer delinquent payments you’ll have to deal with. 

Streamlined accounting can ensure your resources are being put to best use. With expense tracking software, you can easily categorize expenses without losing a receipt. Some child care management platforms even allow payroll capabilities, saving your HR person some sweat every payday.  

Want to know something great? Playground has billing, payroll, and expense tracking to help you manage finances on all fronts in one user-friendly platform. That’s right—handle all your daycare finances in one place. Talk about streamlined!

Solutions to streamline daycare management from Playground

Successful daycares require your attention in many different areas, so Playground helps by making billing, attendance, registration, communication, paperwork, payroll, and more as efficient as possible.

Utilize daycare attendance software

Tracking attendance can be a tedious and messy task on paper, which is why many daycare providers opt for digital solutions like daycare attendance software. These programs allow you to mark down attendance using a tablet or mobile device—you may even want families to sign themselves in. 

Playground’s attendance software allows parents to check their child in and out daily on a shared platform, and multiple students can be checked in at once. We can help you visualize and personalize student schedules. Plus, parent signatures are accepted virtually with dates and timestamps, and Playground creates full attendance reports within seconds. 

Simplify food program reporting

If you’ve managed a daycare with food service for any amount of time, you know how complicated it can become. Handling food for children, especially from food depositories, already comes with considerations like food safety, temperature recording, quality control, and staff training to manage these considerations. And what about all the reporting needed? Boy.

Luckily, Playground helps you manage your daycare’s food program with ease. Playground creates automated CACFP reports, meal plans, meal counts, and organizational options for tagging meals as free, reduced, and paid. It also allows staff to record each child’s food and record how well they ate that day.  

Save money by investing in a full-service platform

The administrative processes behind running a successful daycare are tremendous in number, meaning you’ll need to invest in a lot of software just to make it through the day-to-day. Sampling countless platforms isn't feasible for many daycare facilities, where every dollar counts. 

Luckily, there are all-in-one platforms for child care management out there. By picking the right software, you can replace other software you’re using, saving you resources and integration hassle. Whatever your daycare’s needs are, child care management software like Playground can support your efforts. 

Use Playground to streamline the management of your daycare. We’ll help you budget your money and save your time, allowing you to prioritize other important tasks like marketing, staff training, and improving your daycare environment.

Playground can be your all-in-one daycare management software

We hope this guide has helped you strategize ways to improve your daycare business, but we’re not done helping. Playground is ready to consolidate daycare management so you can focus on creating a much-needed, successful facility. To try it out, book a free demo today!