The cost of turnover is extremely high. It's estimated that it costs twice as much to attract new families to your center as opposed to retaining current families. This makes keeping families enrolled just as important as gaining leads and enrolling new children.
Tracking Enrollment Retention
In a 2021 survey conducted by ChildcareCRM, 47% of respondents said they don’t track their enrollment retention rate. Another 27% said they do track this key performance indicator (KPI) but that they aren’t sure it’s entirely accurate.
Tracking KPI’s such as your enrollment retention rate is an essential component of understanding how your business is performing among other centers in your community. This metric also allows you to make informed decisions about what areas you may need to improve upon in your center’s engagement strategy.
How to find your enrollment retention rate:
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Find out how many enrolled children you have at the end of a given period (week, month, quarter, or year).
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Subtract the number of new enrollments you’ve acquired over that time.
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Divide by the number of customers you had at the beginning of that period.
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Then, multiply that by one hundred.
For example, if you had 150 enrolled children in September and ended the month with 135 children, after enrolling 8 new ones during the month, your enrollment retention rate would be 84.67% for that month.
If that sounds too complicated or if you’re measuring this KPI for multiple locations, the easiest way to track your enrollment retention rate is in your Childcare Management System (CMS). For more information on improving your enrollment process, watch the video below.
Download the step-by-step guide for childcare to boost your enrollment retention rate and learn how to ‘wow’ your enrolled families.
