Day Nursery App from Apps Central was featured on QA Nursery magazines website. The piece focuses on Lisa Bennet, managing director of Cherrytrees Nurseries.
"Lisa Bennet, managing director of the four Cherrytrees Nurseries sites in Scotland, explains the nursery-to-parent communications challenges they faced and how Apps Central’s Day Nursery App improved engagement.
About the Nurseries
Cherrytrees Nurseries was formed in 2000, with its first nursery in Melrose in the Scottish Borders. Three more followed, in Dunbar, Edinburgh and Hawick. These four geographically diverse sites currently provide childcare to over 700 children.
Cherrytrees Nurseries have been awarded either ‘Good’ or ‘Very Good’ in their latest Care Inspectorate reports.
The Challenges
Communication with parents is vital in a nursery setting. Our main challenge was to share information as quickly as possible - from dietary requirements and rescheduled activities through to the latest news on our teddy bears’ picnic and Lego building on a trip to the museum.
Although we publish four newsletters a year, post notices in the classroom and email parents, a number of factors can create communication problems. These include a change of circumstances at home, a change of email account, different carers picking up children, and so on.
The Solution
We worked with Apps Central, creators of the Day Nursery App, and soon had the perfect real-time solution to meet our needs. It had the functionality we were looking for and the image we wanted to project in terms of our branding. The costings were good and it is a really professional product. The app went live in our Edinburgh nursery in May 2014, the rest of the group followed in November that same year.
Using Apps Central’s Day Nursery App, we can now send out a weekly update on each nursery room with photographs included. One of the biggest benefits of this is that parents can use our app to see what their child has had for lunch! The benefit for us is that this avoids complaints about duplicating meals!
Our apps are particularly useful to us because some of our nurseries are in rural areas. If we experience a power cut and loss of telephone systems, for example, we can access the app management centre from another site and post a message to update parents. Last year our Hawick nursery was evacuated because of floods that were affecting the region. The Hawick app enabled us to inform the parents that their children were safe and had been moved to a nearby sports centre.
We have had approximately 420 Apple downloads and 240 Android downloads so far, that equates to 75-80% of our families utilising it.
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