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Kris Murray and Famly: Key interview takeaways
Kris Murray, the President and Founder of The Child Care Success Company (CCSC), is a leader, expert and inspiration for anything related to running a childcare business in the US. Her motivation is to help childcare business owners and directors achieve greater success and profitability by helping them with their overall business management, such as enrollment, budgeting, staffing, scheduling, approaches, goals, and more.
Her unique and innovative marketing strategies, in addition to her distinctive management methodology for childcare businesses, has established her as a highly respected expert in the childcare industry.
Famly is so thrilled to have a longstanding partnership with Kris Murray. Kris remembers that Matt reached out to her all the way back in 2013. Since then, she has been featured in Famly’s blogs, and we have exhibited at her highly anticipated Child Care Success Summit event. Famly can’t wait to continue to collaborate with Kris and share all the insights and conversations with you.
Let’s start with this interview, featured on Kris’s podcast, Child Care Rockstar Radio.
As Matt sat in Famly’s Copenhagen office, and Kris tuned in from Colorado, USA, they candidly talked about a broad range of ECE topics, including globalization, parent communication and engagement, the role of technology, and more.
In case you don’t have time to watch the full video of the interview above, we went ahead and summarized some of the key points here.
There are some fundamental aspects and issues in education that are universal, such as childcare deserts, parents balancing careers, teacher-child ratios, salaries, etc.
However, it is not a secret that some countries, cities and states do excel in some aspects. Observing and understanding how other countries approach issues or situations differently can be powerful and insightful. It can inspire you to improve your childcare business, and discover new ways to foster children's social, emotional, and cognitive development.
Our main focus is creating a product for US ECE providers, but Famly also offers additional benefits by providing global perspectives.
Today, Famly’s early childhood platform assists over 6,300 childcare centers. We are present in 18 countries, supporting over 412K young children in their early development and growth as social, emotional and thinking individuals. Also, as a company, we have 5 offices across the globe and 130 employees from all over the world. We are proud of the inherent global awareness our company brings to early childhood education.
But now back to the conversation between Matt and Kris and what they have to say about the importance of globalization in ECE.
Most of us have heard that common phrase, “it takes a village to raise a child.” Collaboration, engagement and consistent communication between every member of that village are essential to early childhood development.
At Famly, we focus on making it easy and accessible for parents and teachers to communicate and collaborate, with features like the newsfeed with pictures and videos, and direct messaging between staff and parents, and so much more.
Matt explains two key reasons why we care so much about parent engagement:
Research has shown how critical the first 5 years are for a child's development. Collaboration and integration between the home and childcare center is essential to allowing young children to flourish and develop.
Families are your customers, and customers are key to a successful business.
Word of mouth is big for childcare centers because parents often ask other parents for recommendations. Parents or caregivers are more likely to recommend a childcare program if they feel it is a positive learning environment with consistent parent-staff communication that enables them to feel as involved as possible in their child’s growth and learning.
Matt and Kris also mention that communication between ECE staff and parents should not be limited to the two busiest times of day: pick up and drop off. With Famly, constant communication throughout the day is effortless and easy for the staff and the caregivers.
This is just the surface of their conversation. Listen to what else they say about parent engagement and parent-teacher communication here:
While we may be a bit biased towards the benefits of technology in ECE at Famly, we think technology is valuable in education because of the seamless collaboration it enables.
Before we get into the advantages of technology in ECE, we are adamant that technology is never to replace ECE staff, or to interfere with time engaging with the children, because that is when real development and growth happens.
Technology is simply to assist and support the ECE staff, and the parent-staff partnership, so staff can do what they do best - teach, engage and play with the little ones.
With that said, our platform incorporates ways to help you with taking photos and videos, plan activities, budget and have automatic payments, and so much more. Famly’s entire platform is based on our mission to support ECE staff, and to make communication easy and accessible for all adults that are helping our little ones develop and grow into their unique social, emotional, creative, knowledgeable selves.
Although it seems like everything around us is digitized, technology is not always so easy and intuitive for everyone. Staff may be worried about how to use the platform, or unsure how to take a video, or worried that they misspelled a word in the message to the parents. At Famly, we are so proud of our platform with features like Sidekick, and a simple interface, that make technology as user-friendly as possible for all. We are also so proud of our incredible customer support team that’s always ready to help with various features within the platform to make technology as easy as possible.
This only touches the surface on the potential advantages of technology in education that Matt and Kris discuss. See what else they have to say below.
I hope you enjoyed the full podcast if you gave it a watch. Otherwise, I hope you found these snippets and summaries insightful!
Guidance from the Danish Health Ministry, translated in full to English.
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The full recommendations from a working group of over 70 nursery chains in the UK.
Please note: here at Famly we love sharing creative activities for you to try with the children at your setting, but you know them best. Take the time to consider adaptions you might need to make so these activities are accessible and developmentally appropriate for the children you work with. Just as you ordinarily would, conduct risk assessments for your children and your setting before undertaking new activities, and ensure you and your staff are following your own health and safety guidelines.
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