How Playto Built a Data-Driven Enrollment Engine Across 3 New York Centers with illumine

The Challenge: Growing Fast, But Flying Blind

Before illumine, Playto's enrollment process lived across a patchwork of tools: a shared inbox, sticky notes, and a legacy childcare app that had never quite earned the team's trust. Inquiries came in from different places with no consistent way to track them, follow up, or see which ones turned into tours and admissions. Leadership had no real visibility into how each of the three centers was performing.

The team's previous app told a quiet story of its own: the director admitted she had all but stopped opening it.

Choosing illumine: A Phased Migration, Driven by a Champion

Rather than attempt a single, disruptive switch-over, Playto suggested a phased migration, sequencing the rollout across CRM and parent communication. Phase one centered on the enrollment engine: capturing inquiries, scheduling tours, and giving leadership a live view of the pipeline across all three centers. It involved only the marketing and leadership teams to start. Parent communication and billing were planned as a deliberate second phase, so that parents and teachers could be onboarded thoughtfully once the admissions foundation was solid.

Playto approached adoption just as deliberately. With leadership visibly using the CRM dashboard themselves and expecting the same from every center, adoption became a top-down expectation rather than an optional add-on.

Onboarding and Migration: A Fully Supported Switch

Switching CRM platforms mid-growth carries real risk, so illumine treated onboarding as its own workstream. 100% of Playto's data was migrated over from its previous platform, and every center's admissions staff went through dedicated training calls, including separate setup calls for the Facebook Lead Integration and AI Enrollment Agent add-ons.

Phase One in Action: Reimagining the Enrollment Experience

Phase one changed three specific things about how a family's first contact with Playto is handled.

1. A Branded Forms Experience on the Website

Two new forms on the Playto website, Get in Touch and Schedule a Tour, are fully branded with Playto's fonts, colors, and styling, with a live preview before publishing.

2. Complete Information on Every Inquiry

Every field (Name, Email, Phone, Child's Name, Gender) can be set to Required, Optional, or Hidden, so every inquiry arrives with exactly what the team needs to follow up with confidence.

3. Parents Control Their Own Tour Booking

A clean, self-service booking experience, like Calendly but built directly into illumine, linked to the family's inquiry record. Directors get real-time visibility, and staff have one dashboard to edit, reschedule, or cancel any tour.

How Playto Is Making the Most of illumine's CRM

With the enrollment foundation in place, Playto's team has leaned into illumine in five specific ways.

1. Reduced Staff Workload with Automated Workflows

Automated workflows re-engage ghosted tours, welcome new admissions, and follow up after every tour, without a staff member having to remember to send them.

2. Tour Management That Fills More Tours

A booking experience that showcases each center's best facilities, plus a clear appointment view that keeps every high-intent lead on track to actually show up on tour day.

3. A Quick Cross-Center View for Directors and Owners

One dashboard shows inquiry volume, tour activity, and conversion across all three centers, so leadership can spot at a glance which center needs more attention.

4. Full-Funnel Ad Attribution with Google Tag Manager

URL parameters passed through Google Tag Manager give Playto end-to-end visibility into exactly which ad copies are generating leads, not just which channel.

5. Add-On Features: Facebook Lead Integration and the AI Enrollment Agent

Two premium modules sit on top of the core CRM, each set up through its own dedicated onboarding call with illumine's team.

Facebook Lead Integration: Facebook ad leads flow directly into the same CRM pipeline as website inquiries, with no manual re-entry.

AI Enrollment Agent (voice): A voice-based AI front desk answers routine parent questions and books tours automatically, including after hours.

Phase Two, Ahead of Schedule: Parent Communication and Billing

When illumine's Feed rolled out to teachers and parents, the guideline was modest: teachers were asked to post at least once a day, just enough to get comfortable with the habit. It didn't stay modest for long. Within the first day, one teacher had already posted 20 updates, because parents were liking and commenting back almost as soon as each post went up.

The rollout felt just as smooth on the parent side. Families started engaging with updates from day one, with no training needed and no learning curve, a sharp contrast to how rarely anyone had opened Playto's previous app.