Effective Strategies to Captivate Students and Parents with Your After-School Activities
An after-school program can provide children with many opportunities, including additional academic support and social skills development. It can also foster a sense of community among parents and families in your neighborhood. However, in order for such an initiative to be successful, it takes more than just providing engaging activities.
Without a doubt, recruiting new students is certainly not an easy task. Yet, it is not impossible to accomplish. Below, we’ll go over some effective ways to promote your after-school program to parents and children!
1. Run A Proper Website
A website is the best place for parents and students to learn more about your after-school center’s programs. They can also learn about your staff as well as the features that distinguish your facility, in addition to upcoming events, relevant announcements, and any adjustments to activity schedules.
You want your after-school center’s website to be one of the first things parents and students see when searching for after-school programs online. Make your content SEO-friendly and optimize the whole thing for mobile devices. Mind the page load speed as well to avoid a high bounce rate.
2. Be Serious about Social Media
Platforms like Facebook and Instagram allow your after-school center to fully engage with your community. You can even use these platforms to answer questions and address concerns from parents and students, whether they’re related to your programs, events, or activities.
The difference is that, unlike your after-school center’s website, which is primarily focused on long-form text, social media platforms are frequently more visually focused. This suggests that you need to adapt and transform your content into other formats, such as infographics, image carousels, or short videos.
3. Hand Out Flyers
When it comes to engaging parents and students who may not be very active on social media, distributing flyers is the best way to go. This printed advertising media may appear to be out of date, but it can still effectively capture attention and encourage people to take action– in your case, enrolling in your after-school programs.
The benefits of using flyers in your advertising effort include low production costs. You can simply go to a next-door print shop and ask them to print a small quantity. In fact, when it comes to designing it, you can just go to PosterMyWall.com and experiment with their after-school program flyer templates.
Schools, local cafes, and community centers are ideal places to distribute after-school program flyers. They are where you are most likely to meet potential clients. However, you can also distribute them digitally. You can share them on social media and your website, or attach them to emails.
4. Send Out Regular Emails
Many companies keep their customers engaged by sending out regular messages, and you should do the same! However, in order to do so, you must first collect email addresses from potential parents, which you can do by posting sign-up sheets at community events and creating simple online forms.
Once you’ve compiled an email address list, you can divide it into different groups based on various criteria. For instance, you could organize parents into groups according to their children’s age ranges. You can also categorize these addresses according to the programs that the parents are interested in.
5. Hold Virtual Reality Tours
Virtual tours are especially useful for busy parents who don’t have time to visit your after-school center in person, allowing them to view classrooms and other facilities from the comfort of their own homes or offices. Not only does it make enrollment more exciting, but it also draws in technologically savvy clients.
A traditional campus tour allows prospective parents to meet your staff in person and gain an understanding of your center’s environment. However, some of them have time constraints that make it difficult to visit in person. This is where holding a virtual reality (VR) tour of your after-school center can help.
VR campus tours use 360-degree cameras to capture videos of the campus from all angles. Parents and students can access these tours via smartphones and computers, and many tours even include interactive features. They can click on various sections to learn about specific buildings, open spaces, and facilities.
The Takeaway
Offering high-quality after-school programs can provide numerous benefits to children in your community. However, running something like this can present unique challenges, such as competing against other aftercare centers. Luckily, if you believe you need to promote your services and attract new students, the tips above will definitely help you achieve your goal.