How Options For Learning Rebuilt Its Website Around Families' Questions in Three Months

Options For Learning’s Endless Customers Journey

Options For Learning provides free and low-cost child care and early learning to more than 11,000 families across Southern California, from infants and toddlers through elementary and middle school. Most of those families pay little to nothing for high-quality care.

For a family considering their options, the website is where the relationship begins.

As Alice Lai, Vice President of Enrollment, put it:

“The website is really the first place that families engage with us and learn about us. It sets the tone for the type of organization that we are.”

But the old site wasn’t setting the right tone. The platform was limited, simple changes meant waiting on a vendor, and 45 years of information had been organized the way the organization thought about its programs rather than the way parents did.

Leslie Carmell, Vice President of Communications and Public Relations, described the cost:

“A confused mind says no. And that’s where I think it was costing us.”

Behind the scenes, the website, forms, CRM, and family communications all lived in separate systems. Families were asked to complete a 25- to 30-question intake form, and many stopped partway through. The team had no easy way to see how families moved from first visit to enrollment.

From migration to rebuild

Leslie had already started a project to move the site to a more flexible platform. Then the team discovered Endless Customers, began working with IMPACT on content, and realized a straight migration would only move their problems to a new home.

Alice explained:

“If we migrated the way we had originally planned, we still would have inherited some of those structural barriers that existed in the prior website.”

So they stopped midstream, kept their research, and brought the website and content work together under one strategy built around trust.

As Leslie put it:

“It’s not just about sort of advertising your programs, it’s about building trust, and that was the piece that was missing.”

How they implemented

With website, HubSpot, and coaching support from IMPACT, Options For Learning:

• Rebuilt the site around families’ real questions. Alice and Leslie asked their intake and family engagement teams what families ask most, then audited every existing page with IMPACT to decide what to keep, cut, or rewrite.

• Added FAQ sections across key pages so families, and the AI tools many of them now use to search, can find clear answers.

• Moved to HubSpot CMS on IMPACT’s TRUST theme, adapted to their brand, so the team can manage and improve the site themselves.

• Replaced the long intake form with a simple interest form connected to HubSpot, with automated follow-up after families reach out.

• Built an in-house content engine, bringing on a content manager and launching a resource hub that turns staff expertise into articles families can read on their own time.

• Held to a fixed launch date tied to enrollment season, with their Endless Customers coach, Allison Riggs, keeping the team accountable.

Results

Alice and Leslie described a website, and a team, that now works very differently:

• A finished website: nearly 100 pages launched in about three months, after more than a year of stalled work. Much of it was new content, not migrated pages.

• A steady publishing rhythm: the resource hub is on track to publish three articles a week, with transitional kindergarten articles drawing the most readers so far.

• Data at their fingertips: instead of waiting on a manual download, Alice now checks family interest daily and by the hour.

• Better decisions, faster: the data showed families were reaching out on Fridays, a day the intake team didn’t work, so the team moved to a five-day schedule. It also showed families searching for “daycare near me,” a term the organization had long avoided, so they’re now testing how they present those pages.

• A clear view of the family journey: with the website, forms, and CRM connected, the team no longer relies on anecdotes to understand how families find them.

Alice summed up the biggest change:

“Change is possible. We can now think outside the box, try something new, use data to do so, and adjust and pivot if we need to.”

Why coaching mattered

With roughly 70 preschool and school-age sites across Southern California, there was always a more urgent fire than the website. Coaching kept the project from slipping back to the bottom of the list.

Alice described what that support looked like:

“What they did is really sort of like hold our hand while holding our feet to the fire to help us achieve the goal together, and we wouldn’t have been able to do that without them.”

Leslie was even more direct:

“If we were still proceeding with our previous plan, we’d still be proceeding with our previous plan.”

IMPACT also helped adapt the system to a nonprofit that provides a service rather than selling one. Internally, the team now calls their version “Endless Families.”

What’s next

For Options For Learning, launch was the starting line. Their plan forward:

• Finish and publish an eligibility calculator so families can see whether they qualify on their own

• Keep testing and improving pages based on how families actually search and browse

• Keep turning their team’s decades of expertise into resources families can use

• Extend the same trust-first approach to the messages families receive after they enroll

Because when families can find honest answers on their own time, more of them take the next step.

Want results like this in your business?

If your website has been “almost done” for longer than you’d like to admit, or it isn’t answering the questions your buyers bring to it, Options For Learning’s story shows what changes when you build around those questions and have the accountability to finish.

Curious where your business stands today? Take the free Instant Diagnostic to see how buyers and AI see you, or schedule time to talk with our team about what the Endless Customers Coaching Program could look like for you.