The children’s activity industry has a language problem. Not the kind parents notice — the kind that keeps the entire sector fragmented, invisible to analytics, and locked into software silos. Open data standards for activity providers don’t exist yet. That needs to change.
A student record in one platform looks nothing like a student record in another. A “class” is a “session” in one system and a “slot” in the next. A “term” means twelve weeks in London and eight weeks in Warsaw. Every provider is an island. And islands don’t build economies.
What Other Industries Already Figured Out
This isn’t a new problem. It’s just new to us. Other sectors hit the same wall — and broke through it.
- Healthcare: Patient records were trapped in proprietary hospital systems. Then HL7 FHIR created a universal data standard. Suddenly, health apps could read records from any hospital. An entire generation of digital health tools emerged overnight.
- Finance: Banks held customer data hostage. Open Banking standardised financial APIs. The result: a fintech ecosystem worth billions, with better products for consumers at lower cost.
- Travel: Airlines couldn’t distribute rich offers beyond legacy booking systems. IATA NDC standardised offer and order data. New distribution models followed.
- Real estate: Property listings were a mess of incompatible formats. RESO created shared data standards — and made platforms like Zillow and Realtor.com possible.
The pattern is consistent: standardise the core data vocabulary → unlock new tooling → create pricing transparency → improve outcomes for end users. Every single time.
Why Open Data Standards for Activity Providers Are Overdue
Consider what’s impossible today because the children’s activity sector lacks a shared data language:
- Cross-platform reporting. A franchise with 40 locations using three different software systems can’t compare retention rates without manual spreadsheet work.
- Marketplace comparisons. Parents can’t search “Saturday morning gymnastics for 6-year-olds within 5km” and get structured, comparable results — because no two providers describe their offerings the same way.
- Industry-level analytics. Nobody knows the real average retention rate for a children’s dance studio. Or the median class size for STEM clubs. The data exists — scattered across thousands of disconnected systems — but it can’t be aggregated.
- AI and search visibility. Google and AI assistants rely on structured data. Schema.org already defines vocabularies for sports events. But the children’s activity industry hasn’t mapped its concepts to these standards, so it remains largely invisible to intelligent search.
What Should (and Should Not) Be Standardised
Here’s the real tension: activity providers are deeply varied, and personalisation is a genuine competitive advantage. A martial arts dojo runs differently from a swimming academy. A franchise with 80 locations behaves differently from a single independent music school. The standard must be broad enough to enable interoperability and narrow enough to preserve what makes each provider unique.
Standardise the skeleton, not the skin.
What belongs in a shared standard
- Student/participant record: Name, age, guardian contact, medical flags — structured identically so a child transferring between providers or locations doesn’t start from zero.
- Activity description: A universal way to describe what’s offered — activity type, age range, skill level, duration, capacity.
- Schedule/session: Start time, end time, recurrence pattern, instructor, venue. Whether you call it a “class,” “session,” or “slot,” the underlying data should be the same shape.
- Enrolment and attendance: Who signed up. Who showed up. Drop-off points.
- Pricing unit: Per session, per term, per month, per package — with a shared taxonomy so comparisons are possible.
What stays proprietary
- Curriculum design and lesson plans
- Grading systems and skill progression frameworks
- Brand experience and communication style
- Internal staff management workflows
- Custom reporting beyond shared KPIs
This distinction matters. Nobody is asking a ballet school to teach like a coding academy. The standard defines how you describe what you do — not how you do it.
What This Unlocks for Franchise Operators
If you run a multi-location activity business, the practical benefits are immediate:
- True cross-location benchmarking. Compare retention, fill rates, and revenue per session across locations — even if they run different software. No more “our London data doesn’t match our Berlin data.”
- Faster onboarding of new franchisees. A standardised data model means new locations plug into your reporting from day one, not month three.
- Portability and reduced vendor lock-in. If your data follows a shared standard, switching or integrating platforms becomes a configuration task, not a migration nightmare.
- Marketplace readiness. When parents search for activities — and they increasingly do through aggregators and AI assistants — providers with structured, standardised data will appear. Others won’t.
- Industry credibility. Sectors with shared data standards attract investment, regulatory support, and policy attention. The children’s activity industry is a massive economic force that currently can’t prove its own size.
The Initiative Zooza Is Building
At Zooza, we’ve spent years deep in the operational reality of children’s activity providers — from dance studios in Central Europe to sports academies scaling across multiple markets. We see the fragmentation firsthand. And we believe the solution isn’t another proprietary platform. It’s shared infrastructure.
We’re starting work on an open data standard for the children’s activity sector, beginning with the UK and US markets where the density of providers and software platforms makes the case most urgent. This isn’t a Zooza-only initiative. It requires input from providers, platform builders, franchise operators, and the broader ecosystem.
The goal: define a minimal, extensible data vocabulary — open-source, governed transparently — that any platform can implement and any provider can benefit from. Think of it as the FHIR moment for children’s activities.
If you operate multiple locations or a franchise network and you’ve felt the pain of incompatible data, inconsistent reporting, or platform lock-in — this is for you. The first step is the conversation.
One takeaway: The children’s activity sector will either build its own data standards or have them imposed by marketplace platforms that don’t understand the nuances. Better to lead than to follow. Start the conversation with Zooza — and help shape what this standard looks like before someone else decides for you.
