Communication is Key and Other Lessons From a Coffee Chat

Last month, we hosted a “Meet the Leaders” coffee chat for our families to come and learn a little more about Elite. We wanted to extend our reach to parents directly to really get a pulse on what they need to know and how they are feeling about how we are doing as a business serving them and their children. 

We are always looking for ways to improve what we do here at Elite so decided to experiment with this fun offering. Your child’s happiness is our top priority!!

Well, we had 12 families representing a wide range of our student population come to our first meeting. We had parents of little ones and older children. We had families who were brand new to us and those who had been with us for multiple years ranging all the way up to an 8 year family. Here are a few things that we educated families about and a few things that we learned. It was a GREAT coffee!!

COMMUNICATION IS KEY

Parents are wanting really clear lines about who to communicate with about what. Sometimes, because we have SOOOO many staff, they are not sure who to go to when they have a specific question and that feels uncomfortable. In our effort to provide great service with a lot of staff doing a lot of things, we have actually confused families a bit and we intend on fixing that. We will have a list at the front desk or on the bulletin boards with who to contact and their area of expertise to better help you. 

Parents also want to know when they will be responded to if they send an email and they would love that to be consistent. We will tighten up our policies surrounding response time and make that very clear to all who contact us. 

This group of parents also said that they don’t really LOVE the video messages that we send as it requires them to take notes and watch all while trying to do their “busy life activities”. They instead would rather get bulleted emails with a potential text to alert them to read the important email. We can do that!!

They also LOVE the studio TEAM APP and the information there but do want it to be updated frequently to be 100% accurate with current season information! We hear that and will take care of that too!

WHAT ELSE WE LEARNED

Elite families BELIEVE in our mission of us educating and inspiring their children to be confident, happy and strong human beings. They love the time and effort that we put into our programming and curriculum. They would LOVE more workshops surrounding things to keep our dance athletes growing in other areas too – things like health, nutrition, meditation, leadership, etc. 

We also learned that ALL FAMILIES love and need attention and updates regarding the pathways of their children while here at Elite and thereafter. We have so many channels for that. We have a variety of programs to participate in beyond the traditional dance class offerings. We have non-competitive performance groups and competitive groups. We have productions to participate in outside of our holiday show and recitals. Those productions happen  in Fall, Winter and Spring for kids of all ages and levels. We have our Parent Teacher conferences, our Pathways Meetings and our What’s Next Meetings that all happen in the Spring. We have our RISE ceremonies and our National Honor Society for Dance Arts programs too. We also have Class Assistant and Mentorship Program opportunities for our children entering middle and high school. 

WHAT WE KNOW

We know how much YOU care about your children and we want to be your guide to your child’s happiness through dance here at Elite. We want to be the place where your child feels valued and engaged in an activity that they love and have fun doing. Where they are HAPPY outside of school and home! It is totally wrong when a child doesn’t have a place like that and we strive to be that for YOU and YOUR CHILD!!

We had so much fun and gained so much insight and helped our families to understand just a bit more about Elite and all that we can do to serve you that we are going to continue to offer our COFFEE CHATS for more to benefit from. Please join us for the next one on April 11th at 10am in our Broomfield location! Come JOIN US!!!

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