KidCheck Secure Children's Check-In Offers Tips for Connecting With New Families and Their Children At Easter

Easter is just around the corner and new visitors are a very important part of this special holiday. It’s a time when those who may not normally attend church come with their friends and family. Making sure that visitors (kids, parents, & grandparents) feel welcome, encouraged, and accepted during this initial visit is essential. But, let’s not leave the opportunity to reconnect with new visitors once they’ve come and gone, to chance.

When visitors attend for the first time, you want to make them feel welcome and confident their children will be in safe hands. Listed below are some ideas for welcoming new visitors and creating an emotional connection, which is imperative for a return visit.

Welcoming Visitors

Here are some suggestions to help make a visiting family, and especially their children, immediately feel welcome:

 

  • Establish a greeting process or greeter team. Make sure the child and parents are personally introduced to the teacher, have them walk the child to their room, and give them an overview of what to expect.
  • Make a colored mark on the check-in label with a highlighter or sticker so it’s known at-a-glance the child is new and may need some more attention and assistance.
  • Find out if they’d like to be introduced to the other children – a more outgoing child may enjoy this, a shy child may find this intimidating.
  • Assign an older child, or one who’s been around for a while, as their buddy for the day.
  • As some children may have anxiety, ask the parents how they’d prefer you handle it. For example how long should you let the child cry before contacting the parent? Would they respond better to more attention from the teacher or from a peer?
  • Integrated text messaging capabilities provide an easy, private way to communication with the parents should it be needed.

Click here for additional Easter safety tips.

Visitor Check-In and Follow Up Information

Following up with visitors is just as important as the welcoming first impression you’ve made. Here are suggestions for visitor follow up as well.

In addition to making new visitors feel welcome, you want to capture enough information to follow up with them, yet you don’t want them to feel overwhelmed or that you are trying to learn too much about them too soon. Our suggestion to best balance this is to capture basic, pertinent information from visitors checking their children in. This includes name, phone, email, and the child’s name, gender and birthday. This provides enough for a safe check-in and for you to complete your follow up outreach, but isn’t overwhelming.

The email address is important to capture as it triggers a direct email to the visitor from KidCheck to remind them to create a login account (name and password) and input the rest of their account information from the comfort of their own home. After this, they will be all set for check-in next time they return to your organization.

KidCheck’s children’s check-in mobile app provides a great opportunity to make a positive first impression with visitors, check them in with a personal touch, shorten your check-in lines, and make the process more efficient.

If you are concerned with delays in check-in lines due to visitors taking longer to input their information, we recommend setting up a separate, manned check-in area specifically for visitors. This will enable them to not feel rushed or that they are holding up others. Plus it provides a great opportunity for a friendly welcome and to meet with visitors. The Registration Assistant tool can help with this as well.

Click here to schedule a free online demonstration to learn more about KidCheck’s feature rich, secure children’s check-in system and how it can assist you with getting first time visiting families to return. For additional overall improving child safety information join us on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, or Pinterest.

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