Hi everyone, today I’m going to talk to you about my top three tips on how to retain your students and keep them within your school.

Tip number one – keep adding new and exciting programs into your school. I think that things can get a bit stagnant at times, especially for students who have been there for three or four years. They get excited to have those new programs coming in.

I know that’s what a lot of our clients have found with Dance Cirque – by bringing in something exciting and new in, everyone gets really pumped about it and they want to come back to classes and try that new thing

Tip number two – Communicating with parents. I’m so big on this because I think we forget how important it is for the parent to know what’s going on in their kids classes.

One of the things I want to tell you guys is a little story that happened at my school probably about 10 – 12 years ago now but I still talk about it a lot today, and I still remember it a lot today. It was actually a circus student – this parent came into a very busy waiting area and was really cranky. She said “I don’t know what goes on in my child’s class, I’ve really never met the teachers, apparently there’s some concert on next weekend that I don’t even know about” and really lost her mind.

Now, of course, my studio owner brain wanted to tell her we’ve probably sent out about 50 emails about that concert throughout the year and how could you not know? But actually, I went, you know what? Fair call – she actually hadn’t been in the classroom because we found that it was too crazy bringing parents into a circus classroom.

I’d never really given options for them to met with the teacher and so she didn’t actually know what was going on. So that’s one way we really changed the way we were doing things around communicating with parents. We bought an app in called Band and if you guys haven’t heard about Band – it is super awesome and a great way to communicate with parents. Now, every single time a child does a class, my staff post on band and the parents get to actually watch what they’re doing. So just remember, parents are the ones that need to know what’s happening because they are the ones who are going to actually be paying the bills and see the value in what the kids are doing.

Tip number three – make sure that you are also showing parents (by using certificate, level cards and reports) and letting them know how their child is progressing. And that’s just a given. My little boy goes to swimming and when he goes up to the next level, he gets his special certificate. We take a photo of it…parents love that stuff and they love the Instagram moment as well. If you can get them to have that certificate with a smile – they’re going to want to post that on socials. That’s free advertising for you. So, with Dance Cirque, we have all those things. We have the level cards, we have the certificate and I know a lot of programs have that, but make sure that you’re using that to your absolute utmost.

They are my top three tips guys.