Return on Investment for Parents

I admit that this isn't strictly a customer service topic. However, if you consider children and their parents as customers of schools, sporting clubs, and other activity providers, then a poor ROI could be considered poor service.

Parents these days are busy people. Some are busier than others, some are just not very interested. Either way, Schools (in particular) and sports clubs need to bear this in mind when placing demands on parents.

If we use some basic economic theory, the following points are clear:
- if parents attend an event and get to see their child singing/dancing/ speaking/ playing/ running/ swimming sufficiently, they are likely to attend a subsequent event;
- if parents attend events, their children gain in self-esteem and often perform better at that even and in other areas;
- if they leave an event having been bored silly with sales pitches and dull speeches, or their child is on stage for three minutes in a one hour show, they are unlikely to return;
- if their child is a reserve in a sports team, and they get very little game time or possibly no game time at all, the parent may pull the child out of the sport completely, or possibly change team or club.

There is an accounting concept for measuring the value gained from a project, called "Return on Investment" (or ROI). If we take the time when the child is doing their thing compared to the time attending the event we get a percentage. Some events display an exceedingly low ROI for parental support. Some examples include:
- a dance show of two and a half hour duration where the average dancer is on stage for less than ten minutes (6.7%);
- a swim meet that takes four hours and a swimmer enters two events, and even if they make the final of both they are in the pool four a total of less than four minutes (1.6%);
- a school performing arts showcase where three classes perform, each for half an hour, and each class has about eight kids performing at any given time (9%, including taking a bow);
- a rugby match where rolling substitution is not allowed. A squad of 19 with 15 on the field. The four subs get between 5 and 20 minutes on the field towards the end of a 55 minute game (9-36%, sometimes 0%).
- cricket matches are tricky, because involvement depends heavily on the role in the team, but batsmen that go out early and don't bowl basically spend about four hours in the field and three hours fifty five minutes annoying people waiting for their batting innings to finish (could be 1%, 2% or 52% depending on how you measure the fielding. Could go as high as 75% for an all-rounder who bowls a lot and bats the entire innings).

If a parent considered their available time to be a scarce resource, and the return on investment of the above events, they would not be incredibly keen to continue supporting such events.

Astute parents might also consider the cost of taking part in a given activity, if it does cost, alongside the time return as well. High cost activities such as dancing could therefore suffer even more so.

Compare these numbers to the following:
- a soccer match, a squad of 14, with 11 on the field at a time, playing 55 minutes in two halves with rolling substitution (and assuming you arrive half an hour early for warm-up) (48% even if you measure their field time over the duration of the whole 90 minutes, 78% if you don't count warm-up).
- a tennis match, where you show up for their matches, which occur with an hour gap in between two hour long matches (66%).

Assuming that the greater good requires us to encourage children to take part in a wide range of activities, then the ROI for these activities needs to be considered.

One might assume that someone who comes up with such concepts has too much spare time on their hands. In my defence, I would like to say that it came to me whilst sitting there watching everyone else's kids do their thing while I was waiting for my own child's moment in the spotlight. Many of the examples above are completely accurate, from my own experience.

Am I being selfish? I don't think so. I think this is common sense and more relevant than ever in the days of two working parents and mind-bogglingly busy children.