Gymboree Play & Music has been fostering creativity and confidence in children ages 0–5 for 30 years. Today, their operations span over 550 locations in 30 countries, making Gymboree Play & Music the global leader in early childhood-development programs.  Because of their excellent offerings, Gymboree Play & Music has developed a large base of happy instructors and parents. Being smart marketers, they began looking for an efficient and effective way to capture stories from these stakeholders. Luckily, Compendium could help.

The Challenge

Prior to Compendium, Gymboree Play & Music was collecting customer stories through surveys. Unfortunately, due to technical constraints, the content was ending up largely unused.

The Solution

Compendium’s business blogging platform allows Gymboree Play & Music to create flexible story-capturing campaigns that are tailored to its class instructors and parents.

To encourage story-sharing from parents, class instructors send emails to class participants requesting (and sharing!) customer stories. Class instructors also offer handouts at the end of their classes, which provide a link to a Compendium-powered page where parents can share their stories.

To encourage story-sharing from class instructors, Gymboree gives each instructor his or her own blog account. This account gives the instructor access to Compendium's content creation tools and helps them share what they’ve been up to in their classroom.

By integrating with Compendium's API, Gymboree and its partners are now making sure that their surveys are getting their due, too. Today, if a customer fills out a survey and gives Gymboree a high ranking, their comments automatically feed into Gymboree's Compendium-powered blog as a story. This story can be approved, declined, or edited by Gymboree's marketing department before it is published to the blog and broadcasted to social media sites.

With all this content flowing in from various sources, Gymboree uses Compendium's content calendar to publish their content strategically across the upcoming days, months, and week—guaranteeing a steady stream of blog content.

The Results

Over the past six months, Gymboree Play & Music has gathered over 500 stories from their different story-capturing methods. Once published, they are sharing these stories to their social media pages and re-purposing them within their newsletters. Gymboree's blog is seeing a 23% click-through rate, which is 14X the industry average. These clicks are leading prospective customers to register for classes, request more information, and share their own stories.