How can we improve recruitment and enrollment?
MAAC wanted to improve its enrollment efforts, so they compared this year’s progress on enrollment against data from the past two years. By looking at day-by-day enrollment numbers and types of eligibility, they were able to make decisions on whether to conduct more recruitment activities or start accepting children from the waitlist at a specific period of time.
MAAC also looked at the number of enrolled, accepted, and waitlisted children by type of eligibility at the program and site level to determine if there were an adequate number of income-eligible children at each site.
Analysis
MAAC created a dashboard with four graphs: displaying the number of enrolled children by date for the current year and the past two years. One graph showed total enrollment, and the other three graphs displayed enrollment in each program type: center-based, family child-care, and partner programs.
MAAC compared the trends of accepted children and assessed the types of eligibility to improve the enrollment efforts.
Result
Based on this information, MAAC determined that programs lacking adequate staffing during the summer were not fully enrolled, whereas programs with adequate staffing met the enrollment requirement. MAAC reinforced recruitment efforts at the sites that were not fully enrolled. Also, staffing decisions will be taken into consideration next year.
Additional details
Audience: Leadership, management
Level of Analysis: Grantee
Difficulty: Moderate
Content Area: ERSEA
Data Sources: ChildPlus, Excel, Tableau
Technical Appendix
The data was pulled from ChildPlus and the dashboards were created using Tableau. Similar graphs can also be made using Microsoft Excel.