How Families Find Your Childcare Listing

If you have created a listing and no families have been in touch yet, there are a few specific things that decide whether parents see you at all. Most of them take a minute to fix.

Check that your listing is published

Filling in your listing and publishing it are two separate steps. Once your details are in, you publish it from your dashboard, and that is when it starts appearing in search results.

If you created your listing before you signed up for an account, check the status on your dashboard now. An unpublished listing does not appear in search results at all.

Post an opening

Every Saturday morning we email families the spots opening up over the next month. Parents can narrow that email down to their own city and to the type of care they want, including home child care.

Only listings with an opening posted are included. A published listing with no openings still appears when a parent searches, but it will not be in the weekly email.

An opening is three pieces of information: the date a spot becomes free, how many spaces, and the ages you can take. If you have room in the autumn, post it with the autumn date. There is more on getting this right in our guide to setting and communicating your availability.

Know where your listing appears

A published listing is doing more than sitting on one page. Parents reach it from several directions.

Search. A parent enters their city or postal code and filters by the ages they need and the hours they want.
Province and city pages. Families who are still narrowing down an area browse by province and then by city, rather than searching for one place by name.
The Saturday email, if you have an opening posted.
Search engines. Your listing has its own page with your name, city and details on it, so parents searching for child care in your area can land on it directly.

This is why the details matter more than they look like they should. The same fields parents filter on are the ones that decide which of these routes you turn up in.

Fill in what parents use to decide

Once a family is on your listing, four things carry most of the weight.

Photos. Parents are trying to picture their child in your space. Three or four honest photos of the play area, the nap space and the yard will do it.
A description in your own voice. Write it the way you would explain your day to a parent standing at your door. What the routine looks like, what you cook, how you handle naps, what you enjoy about the age group you take.
Your hours and the ages you take. Families filter on both of these before they read anything else. If they are blank, you will not appear for the parent who wanted exactly what you offer.
Where you are. You choose how much of your address to show. Your city and the first part of your postal code is enough for a parent to work out whether you are on their route.

Know where inquiries arrive

Families can reach you two ways, and they behave differently.

Most parents contact you directly. Your phone number, email and website appear on your listing, and you choose which of those to display. Those conversations happen entirely between you and the family. We do not sell, trade or rent your information.

Because they happen directly, those conversations are not recorded anywhere in your dashboard. If your dashboard looks empty, check your phone and your email as well.

The second way is your waitlist. A family fills in a short form, and you get an email with the child's name and age, the parent's name, their email and phone number, when they would like to start, and any message they have written. The same details are saved in your dashboard, where you can see the order families joined in and mark the ones you have already contacted.

A waitlist matters most when a family finds you before you have space. You can call them in September rather than losing them in June.

Keep it current

Openings whose date has passed drop out of the weekly email automatically, so a listing that is not updated quietly stops reaching people. Hours change, ages change, and photos age.

A reminder once a month to check your openings, your hours and your photos is enough. If you are full, keep a waitlist running rather than leaving old openings up.

If it is still quiet

Work through three questions in order.

Is the listing published?
Does it have an opening with a date still in the future?
Does it have photos, a description, your hours and the ages you take?

If all three are done, browse the directory and look at your listing beside the others in your area, the way a parent would. Our FAQ answers the questions we get most often, and you can always send us the link to your listing and ask us to look at it.