Visitor Check-In

You want visitors to feel welcome, you want them to feel confident their children will be in safe hands and you want to capture enough information to follow up with them – but you don’t want them to feel overwhelmed or that you are trying to learn too much about them too soon. 

Our suggestion to best balance this is to only capture basic, pertinent information from visitors checking their children in - name, phone, email, child name, child gender and child birthday.   This provides enough for a safe check-in and for you to complete your follow-up reach out, but isn’t overwhelming. 

The email address is important to capture as it triggers a direct email to the visitor from KidCheck to remind them to create a login account (name and password) and input the rest of their account information from the comfort of home.  That way they are all set for check-in when they next return to your organization.

If you are concerned with check-in line delays due to visitors taking longer to input their information, you can set up a separate, manned check-in area specifically for visitors. That way should a visitor take longer, a separate station will not hold up your members checking in. Plus it provides a great opportunity for a friendly welcome and to meet with visitors. 

While there is an option to obtain more information at check-in, we recommend you do not choose "advanced options" to keep the process short and easy. To make sure you don’t have it enabled:

• Choose "settings" and then the "check-in station settings" tab
• Go to "new guardian account options"
• Ensure you have "no, close the advanced options by default" checked. 

Some suggestions to help make the visiting family, and especially their children, feel comfortable and welcome are: 

• Establish a greeting process or greeter team.  Make sure the child and parents are personally introduced to the teacher,  have them walk the child to their room, and give them an overview of what to expect
• Make a colored mark on the label with a highlighter so it’s known at-a-glance the child is new and may need some more attention and assistance
• Find out if they’d like to be introduced to the other children – a more outgoing child may enjoy this, a shy child may find this intimidating
• Assign an older child, or one who’s been around for awhile, as their buddy for the day
• As some children may have anxiety, ask the parents how they’d prefer you handle it  - for example  how long should you let the child cry before contacting the parent?  Would they respond better to more attention from the teacher or from a peer?
  • Click here for more information on text messaging capabilities for parent communication

 Take a look at this link for suggestions around visitor follow up.

What are some suggestions you have for best handling visitor/new member check-in and providing a warm welcome?