Registrations Are Open. Here's How Families Actually Decide — and How to Be the One They Pick
Registrations are open. Which means that over the next few weeks a large number of families in your area will do something they only do once or twice a year: decide where their child spends their Tuesday afternoons for the next nine months.
Most providers respond to that window by posting more. More Facebook posts, more stories, a discount if things go quiet in week three. It’s not that any of that is wrong — it’s that it’s aimed at the wrong part of the problem. Almost nothing about how a parent chooses an activity happens on your Facebook page.
So this is an honest attempt to work out what actually drives new registrations: what the research says, what’s provably folklore, what you can still get done before term starts, and how to tell afterwards whether any of it worked.
Part 1 — What the research says about how parents decide
Parents don’t enter a funnel. They enter at a trigger.
The funnel picture — awareness, then interest, then decision — is a useful diagram and a bad description of reality. Real families don’t drift downward through stages. They sit outside the category entirely, thinking about none of this, until something flips a switch:
She turns three in September. The nursery said he needs to be water-confident. Saturdays have become chaos. Her best friend started ballet and now she wants to. Another parent on the school run mentioned a club. He’s on a screen too much and I feel guilty about it.
Marketing science has a name for these: category entry points — the situations, needs and moments that cause someone to think about a category at all. The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute’s work (Byron Sharp, Jenni Romaniuk) shows that brands grow largely by being linked in memory to more of those moments — not by being loved more deeply by the people who already use them. Romaniuk’s framing is blunt: a brand is invisible until it’s needed, and at that moment it’s either among the first handful of names that come to mind, or it isn’t.
That reframes the whole job. You are not trying to persuade parents that children’s activities are a good idea — about seven in ten parents of school-age children already have a child in organised activity. You are trying to be the name that surfaces at the moment the switch flips, and then to survive the next twenty minutes.
Those next twenty minutes are a loop, not a countdown
Once triggered, a parent goes online. Google’s research team spent years mapping what happens there and named it the messy middle: people cycle between two mental modes — exploration (expanding the set of options) and evaluation (narrowing it) — looping as many times as they need until one option feels good enough. It isn’t linear, it isn’t fixed-length, and it happens across search, maps, reviews, a WhatsApp thread, a local Facebook group and your website, in no reliable order.
Google’s team also identified six cognitive biases that consistently tip that loop toward one option over another. Read them as a checklist of your own weak points:
| Bias | What it means for you |
|---|---|
| Category heuristics | Short, concrete specs beat prose. “Ages 4–6 · Tuesdays 16:30 · 45 min · €14/class” decides more than a paragraph about your philosophy. |
| Social proof | Reviews and recommendations from other parents outweigh anything you say about yourself. |
| Power of now | The longer the wait between wanting and starting, the weaker the offer becomes. “Next intake in January” loses to “there’s a space this Thursday.” |
| Scarcity | ”3 places left in this group” is honest information and a real motivator — as long as it’s true. |
| Authority bias | A paediatrician, a nursery, a coach, a respected local parent — a trusted source vouching for you does work you cannot do for yourself. |
| Power of free | A genuinely free first step is disproportionately attractive. More on why below. |
So how many touchpoints does it actually take?
You’ve probably heard it takes seven. It’s worth being clear about this, because a lot of marketing effort gets spent on it: the “Rule of 7” has no study behind it. It traces back to pre-war advertising lore and survived because it was repeated, not because it was measured. Sources still quoting it rarely cite anything; the honest debunkings point out that the strongest evidence for the rule is its own survival.
There isn’t a credible replacement number either, and anyone offering you one is guessing. What the evidence supports is structural rather than numerical:
- The decision is a loop of variable length — a parent panicking in late August may loop twice; a cautious one weighing up a €900 year of music lessons may loop for a month.
- What matters is presence across the loop, not frequency within one channel. Being seen five times on Instagram by someone who never searches is worth less than being findable once in the exact place they look.
- The loop ends when one option is good enough, not when the best one wins. Friction — a form that breaks, a price you have to email for, a timetable trapped in a PDF — ends it in someone else’s favour.
So stop counting touchpoints. Start counting entry points you’re actually present at. That’s the audit.
Part 2 — The audit: where a new family actually meets you
Before adding anything new, score what you already have. Be harsh. This takes twenty minutes and it’s the highest-value thing in this article.
Mark each row Yes / Partly / No — and note when you last checked it, not when you last set it up.
| # | Question | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | If I search “[my activity] [my town]” on my phone, in incognito, do I appear in the top 3 map results? | This is where most triggered parents land first. |
| 2 | Is my Google Business Profile complete — current hours, photos from this year, a link straight to booking? | Half-finished profiles lose to complete ones with fewer reviews. |
| 3 | How many Google reviews do I have, and when was the most recent? | Recency matters as much as count; parents weight the last month most heavily. |
| 4 | Can a parent see class times, ages and prices without contacting me? | ”Contact us for pricing” is a loop-exit in your competitor’s favour. |
| 5 | From landing on my site, how many taps to a confirmed booking? Count them on your own phone. | Every extra step is an exit. |
| 6 | Can a family start this week, or is the next intake months away? | Power of now, directly. |
| 7 | Is there a free or low-commitment first step, and is it bookable without a phone call? | The zero-price effect only works if it’s frictionless. |
| 8 | If I ask ChatGPT “where can my 4-year-old do [activity] in [town]?” — am I mentioned? | 45% of consumers now use AI for local recommendations. |
| 9 | Do I know, by name, which parents referred a family last year? | If not, my biggest channel is untracked. |
| 10 | Do I have a written list of every family who left, enquired, or attended a trial and didn’t enrol? | This is the cheapest available audience, and most providers can’t produce it. |
| 11 | Am I physically present anywhere a parent is when the trigger fires — nursery, paediatrician, library, playground, school noticeboard? | Category entry points have locations, not just moments. |
| 12 | When a new family enrols, do I ask how they heard about me — and record it? | Without this, everything else here is unfalsifiable. |
Most providers score well on a couple of rows and assume they’re fine. The gap between a full term and a half-full one is usually four or five “No”s in that table — not a lack of effort.
Part 3 — The nine levers, ranked by evidence and by speed
Ranked by return per hour of your time over the next fortnight, not by how modern they sound.
1. The audience you already own — start here, always
Every family who ever enrolled, enquired, attended a trial, sat on a waiting list or left last year is a warm audience that has already done the hard part: they know you exist and they’ve already decided you’re plausible. They skip most of the loop.
They are also, almost universally, the most neglected asset in the business. Providers who’d happily spend €300 on ads won’t spend an hour writing to 200 lapsed families.
What to do this week. Pull four lists — current families (for siblings), lapsed families from the last two years, trial-attended-but-never-enrolled, and unconverted enquiries. Then write to each of them differently. The lapsed list is not a newsletter list: “we’ve got space in Thursday’s group and I thought of Marek” converts; “Our Autumn Timetable Is Live!” does not. This is also the moment to check what your occupancy actually is — across Zooza accounts, average class occupancy sits around 54%, which means most providers are trying to buy new families into rooms that already have empty chairs.
2. Referrals — the biggest channel in this sector, usually untracked
Word of mouth isn’t a nice-to-have in children’s activities; it’s the main mechanism. Parents don’t trust advertising where their children are concerned. They trust the other parent at pickup.
And the effect is measurable, not folkloric. In a Journal of Marketing study tracking around 10,000 customers over nearly three years, Schmitt, Skiera and Van den Bulte found referred customers were at least 16% more valuable and churned roughly 18% less — and unlike the margin advantage, the retention advantage persisted over time. Referred families aren’t just cheaper to acquire; they’re better matched and more socially anchored, which is exactly what the research on belonging would predict.
What to do this week. Three rules separate a referral programme from a discount habit:
- Ask at the peak, not at the end. The moment to ask is right after a parent tells you something went well — after a great first session, a “she loved it” message, a five-star review. Not in a quarterly email.
- Reward the enrolment, not the trial. Bringing a friend to one session is easy. Reward when the referred child commits to a term — and reward both sides.
- Make the reward credit, not a cash discount. Credit toward next term keeps the family in the system; a price cut trains them to expect one. Zooza’s loyalty programme tracks who brought whom so you’re not reconstructing it from memory. The full mechanics are here.
3. Trial classes and open sessions — the highest-converting thing you own
There’s real science under this one. Shampanier, Mazar and Ariely’s Zero as a Special Price showed that free isn’t merely “cheap”: dropping a price to zero produces a disproportionate jump in demand, because people stop weighing costs against benefits and simply perceive a free option as better. Combine that with the power of now and you have the strongest single move available to you — a real class, this week, at no risk, that the child can walk into.
The mechanism isn’t only economic, either. A trial converts because it moves the decision off your marketing and onto the thing you’re actually good at: twenty minutes in a room with your instructor.
What to do this week. Put trials on the calendar for the first three weeks of term and make them self-bookable — the free-price effect evaporates if claiming it requires a phone call during working hours. Then treat the follow-up as part of the product rather than an afterthought: the enrolment decision is usually made within a day or two of the trial, while the child is still enthusiastic, so a same-evening message with a direct link to book the term is worth more than three reminders next week. If you can’t fill individual trials, run one demo class for twenty parents at once — same mechanism, a fraction of the delivery cost. More on why trials work and how to run them without losing your sanity.
4. Reviews — the cheapest social proof, and now it feeds the machines
BrightLocal’s 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey found 97% of consumers read reviews for local businesses — and, the number that should change how you think about this, 49% place as much trust in the views of strangers online as in people they actually know. Reviews are no longer a tiebreaker. For a family with no personal recommendation, they are the recommendation.
There’s a second reason to care right now: reviews are one of the main things AI assistants read when they answer “where can my daughter learn to swim near me?”. Neglecting reviews costs you twice over.
What to do this week. Ask ten specific families — not a mass email. Ask right after a moment that went well. Make it one tap: a short link, sent by message, straight to the review form. And reply to every review, including the critical ones; the reply is read by the next parent, not by the reviewer. The practical version is here.
5. Content that answers the question the parent is actually asking
This is the slow lever — which is why it should start now rather than in October — but understand what it is. It isn’t “blogging”. It’s being the answer to the specific questions a triggered parent types before they’ve decided on anyone:
“swimming or gymnastics for a 4 year old”, “how much do ballet classes cost”, “is my child too young for football”, “what should my child bring to their first music lesson”, “how to choose a dance school”
None of those are “best dance school in [town]”. They’re earlier — the exploration half of the loop — and that’s exactly where a small local provider can win, because national competitors write generic content and you can write about your town, your ages, your prices.
Two formats worth writing first.
“How to choose” guides. Your best-value page, and it works because of category heuristics: parents facing an unfamiliar decision want criteria, not persuasion. Write the honest guide — what to look for at that age, what class size actually means, what to ask about instructor qualifications, what a fair local price looks like, what a good trial feels like. Being the source that helped them decide creates authority bias in your favour before you’ve made a single claim about yourself.
Honest comparison pages. If parents in your area are choosing between you and one obvious alternative — or between two activity types — write the fair comparison. This works only if it’s genuinely fair. Rubbishing the alternative is transparent, and parents are alert to it; a comparison that openly names things the other option does better is far more persuasive, and it converts the readers you actually want. Win on what’s true about you.
6. AI visibility — the channel that went from noise to real in twelve months
A year ago this was speculative. It isn’t now: the same BrightLocal survey found use of ChatGPT and similar tools for local recommendations went from 6% to 45% in a single year. An assistant asked “where can my 4-year-old do gymnastics in Košice?” will produce a short list of names. Being on that list is a distribution question, and it’s decided by whether your class data is machine-readable.
The uncomfortable part: most activity providers are invisible to this. Timetables live in image posts, prices live in DMs, availability lives in the owner’s head. None of that can be read, so none of it can be cited.
What to do this week. Ask ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini the three questions a local parent would ask, and write down what comes back. Then fix the readable layer: real text on your pages (not screenshots of timetables), published prices, structured class data, current reviews, an llms.txt. That’s exactly what Zooza’s AI Visibility tools generate from the class data you already keep. Background reading: AI search for children’s activities.
7. Local physical presence — category entry points have addresses
This is the lever most likely to be dismissed as old-fashioned and most likely to work, because it’s the only one that puts you inside the moment the switch flips. A parent in a paediatrician’s waiting room with an 18-month-old is, by definition, thinking about their child’s development. A parent at a playground on a wet Saturday is having the “we need something to do” thought right now.
Ranked by proximity to a real trigger: nurseries and pre-schools (highest — the staff are trusted authorities and the ages line up exactly), paediatricians and family clinics, school noticeboards and after-school clubs, libraries and children’s centres, playgrounds and soft play, then paediatric physios, dentists and family cafés.
What to do this week. Don’t print 500 generic flyers. Pick five locations, and bring each one something the venue wants — a nursery wants to look helpful to its parents, not to hand out adverts. Offer a free taster session on their premises, or a genuinely useful one-page “activities by age” guide in which your classes are one section. And put a QR code on everything that goes straight to a bookable trial, not to your homepage — otherwise you’ve created a trigger and handed it to whoever the parent searches next.
8. Local Facebook groups — high value, easy to get wrong
Local parenting groups (“[Town] Mums”, nursery groups, neighbourhood groups) are where a large share of real recommendations happen. They’re valuable for exactly the reason they’re dangerous: they run on trust, and they punish self-promotion hard.
The rule: you want to be recommended in them, not to advertise in them. When a parent posts “any swimming classes for a 2-year-old?”, the reply that converts comes from another parent, not from the business. So the work is upstream — being good enough that parents mention you, being present and useful in the group as a human being, and (this part is legitimate and effective) asking a few happy parents to answer those threads honestly when they see them.
What to do this week. Join the five most active local groups as yourself. Read the rules, and find the group’s “recommendations day” if it has one — most do, and most permit business posts there. Answer questions in your area of expertise without pitching. And ask three happy parents to keep an eye out for “does anyone know a…” posts.
9. Brand search ads — insurance, not growth
Worth running, worth understanding correctly. Ads on your own name are cheap (nobody competes for relevance on your brand) and they protect the moment when a parent who heard about you from a friend or a flyer types your name in — and would otherwise land on a competitor’s ad, an aggregator, or an abandoned old page.
But be honest about what they are: brand search almost entirely harvests demand that something else created. If everything above works, brand searches rise and brand ads convert brilliantly, and it looks like the ads did it. They didn’t — they collected it. Run them as insurance on the rest, keep the budget small, and send them to a page where someone can book, not to your homepage.
If you’re going to spend on non-brand paid search too, set up event tracking first, or you’ll be optimising blind.
On ambassadors and influencers
Worth doing, worth structuring. The mechanism is authority bias plus social proof — but the version that works in this sector isn’t a paid post from an account with 40,000 followers in another country. It’s five local parents with real audiences of other local parents, given a free term in exchange for documenting it honestly over eight weeks.
Three things make it work rather than waste a term’s fees: pick people whose audience is geographically yours; ask for the story over time (week one nerves, week five progress, the moment it clicked) rather than one polished post; and let them say true things, including reservations — an ambassador who only raves is read as an advert. Agree in writing what you’d like mentioned and what you’d never ask them to say, and give them a trackable link so you can tell what it did.
Part 4 — What to do in the next seven days
Ordered by speed-to-enrolment, and designed to be finishable alongside actually running your classes.
- Day 1 — Lists. Export the four audiences (current, lapsed, trial-no-enrol, unconverted enquiries). This is the foundation of everything else.
- Day 2 — Write to them. Four short, different, personal messages. A sibling offer to current families; a named, specific invitation to lapsed ones.
- Day 3 — Trials live. Put trial slots on the calendar for weeks 1–3 and make them self-bookable. Set up the same-evening follow-up with a direct booking link.
- Day 4 — Reviews and profile. Complete the Google Business Profile, add this year’s photos, and personally ask ten families for a review with a one-tap link.
- Day 5 — The readable layer. Get times, ages and prices into real text on your site. Run the three AI questions and note the gaps.
- Day 6 — Five local venues. Five conversations, not 500 flyers — each with a QR straight to a bookable trial.
- Day 7 — Ask and track. Turn on referral tracking, and add “How did you hear about us?” to your booking form. Then leave it alone and let it run.
One thing to skip: the discount. When a term looks slow in week three, price is the reflex — and it’s the wrong lever. It attracts the families most likely to leave when the deal ends, and it devalues the term for everyone who paid full price. If you need something that works that fast, the answer is a free trial, not a cheap term.
Part 5 — How to know whether any of it worked
Most providers can’t say which channel filled their term, which means next year they repeat everything — including the parts that did nothing. Two habits fix that permanently, and both cost nothing.
Ask every new family how they heard about you — a required field at booking, with a short list of real options (a friend, Google, Instagram, a flyer at X, a trial, ChatGPT, other). It’s self-reported and therefore imperfect. It’s also dramatically better than nothing, and for a word-of-mouth-driven business it’s the only way to see your biggest channel at all, because referrals leave no digital trace.
Then measure four numbers per term — and only these four:
| Number | How to get it | Why it earns its place |
|---|---|---|
| Enrolments by reported source | Booking-form field | Tells you what to repeat |
| Trial → enrolment rate | Trials booked vs. terms sold | The single most improvable number you have |
| Cost per enrolled child, by channel | Spend ÷ enrolments | Makes paid channels comparable to free ones |
| Occupancy | Filled places ÷ capacity | The context for all of it — benchmarks here |
Set a baseline this term. Next August you’ll be making decisions from evidence instead of memory — and that compounds faster than any single tactic on this list.
Where the software actually helps
None of this is fundamentally a software problem, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise — the levers above are mostly conversations, asks and follow-ups. But every one of them fails at the same point: the moment a parent’s interest has to survive contact with your admin. That’s the part Zooza is built for.
- Trials that book themselves. Trial booking lets a parent pick a slot, get a confirmation and a reminder, and turn up — without a single message from you. The power-of-free effect only survives if claiming it is frictionless.
- Booking that doesn’t send families away. The Immersive Booking Engine™ keeps the whole flow on your own site — no redirect to an unfamiliar portal at the exact moment doubt is cheapest. Fewer taps, fewer exits, and ad tracking that actually works.
- Prices and timetables a machine can read. Class registration plus AI Visibility turn the class data you already keep into structured, citable information — for Google, and for the assistants 45% of parents now ask.
- Referrals that get tracked, not remembered. Credits and the loyalty programme record who brought whom and reward the enrolment automatically.
- Follow-up that happens on the evening it matters. Parent messaging and WhatsApp mean the post-trial message goes out while the child is still talking about it — not on Sunday when you finally sit down.
- The four numbers, without a spreadsheet. Occupancy, trial conversion and enrolment sources live in your reports — and you can simply ask your own AI assistant for them in plain language.
The bottom line
The instinct when registrations open is to shout louder. The evidence points somewhere less exciting and far more useful: be present at the moments parents enter the category, be findable and legible when they start looking, make the first step tiny and immediate, and let other parents do the persuading.
Almost none of that requires budget. All of it requires deciding, this week, which four “No”s in the audit you’re going to turn into “Yes” before the first class.
Related reading: what actually drives growth in this sector · breaking through a local growth ceiling · the decision-time window · why families stay once they arrive
