For years, swim schools have been providing certificates to their students whenever they progress from one level to another. This reward and recognition plays an important part in motivating the child and providing the parents with some re-enforcement about their child’s progress.
Despite the positive results that certificates provide, there are some small downsides that come with using certificates in your swim school.
The first downside is the cost of having these certificates printed. Often these are printed on a high quality paper, with colour on both sides. A large centre may require thousands of certificates over the course of a year which can result in a significant cost. What makes matters worse is that, a lot of parents do not pick up their certificates or forget to collect their child’s certificates resulting in wastage of lot of paper, effort and time.
Perhaps, a more significant cost is the time cost involved with writing out certificates. A large centre may be writing over 1 thousand certificates per year which can take up to 30 seconds per certificate. This can compound into many hours of additional work over the course of a year.
Despite these downsides, it is still easy to conclude that having certificates do add value to your program and customers’ experience.
However, with the emergence of innovative technology, there may be a better and more cost-effective approach to create the same result.
Many swim schools have made a move to digital certificates. These digital certificates can look exactly the same and have the same quality as your printed certificate and can be delivered automatically to parents via an email or an online portal.
Parents can then choose to print the certificates, however they want and whenever they want.
An added benefit is that digital certificates can be generated automatically including the addition of the child’s name, teacher and progression date. By automating this process, a huge amount of administration time can be saved.
The potential downside of digital certificates is that there is no physical certificate to hold and take home until the parent prints it out. Some parents like to get a physical copy to take home, however, we have found this applies to only 10-15% of parents. Majority of them are happy to receive them in digital form via email.
The best approach we have seen is to use a hybrid of physical and digital certificate. You can use digital certificate as your primary way of delivering certificates and keep a small amount of physical certificates for those parents who would like to get a hard copy. You can communicate this at the point of assessment by including something like “a certificate for Will is attached, if you would like a hard copy, please feel free to contact us at the pool deck desk”.
Overall, digital certificates provide Swim schools with the advantage of lower costs and greater efficiency whilst maintaining the same outcomes and benefits of physical certificates.
As technology continues to progress, we are bound to see more and more swim schools take advantage of digital certificates.
If your swim school is interested in digital certificates, please look into our SwimDesk software which has a digital certificate feature- www.swimdesksoftware.com