Childcare
Tags: Parents and Carers, Participant Diversity, Scholarships
✅ Offer financial support for childcare.
- Build it into your budget.
- Link it to sponsorships, or university partners, or make part of the registration fee from all attendees go towards providing childcare support as service.
- Add an option to the registration, e.g.: "Donate $20 to help with childcare costs."
- Collect the data on the registration form. How many people would make use of childcare services or grants?
- In general, the two major options are either to 1) award childcare grants (people decide how to spend it, e.g. on their home babysitter) or 2) provide on-site services.
Grants
- Based on our research, grants to cover childcare costs seem to be more popular with attendees. (On-site childcare services can be costly for attendees because of additional travel costs for bringing children along.)
- You might survey your participants to determine their preference for grants vs. on-site childcare services.
- Be sure to consider issues like whether grant recipients will need to submit an invoice or receipt from someone (the childcare provider) with a Tax ID.
- For those who do bring kids to the event/conference:
- Provide cost-free access to the conference center/venue for caregivers/babysitters
- This allows caregivers to come to the conference for e.g. infant hand-offs (for nursing, for example) as opposed to parents losing additional time walking back to hotel rooms.
On-Site Services
- There are companies that provide childcare at conferences. While NumFOCUS makes no specific endorsements, we did find these companies in our research who are providing event-based childcare:
- Another possibility is to organize a "parallel" conference for older children
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