Babsy is more than just a name, it’s a philosophy, a mission, a strong team of committed people! We’ll talk about how we got our name in the next article, how to pronounce it correctly and also about the topic of permits, all as part of our learning process.
The question of how to pronounce our name was actually asked a little more often at the beginning, than you would imagine. At the very beginning, when everything was still in the test phase, Babsy was called e-Babsi and referred to “easy babysitter” or “electronic babysitter”. However, this wording was not optimal, and after interviewing a few people with a variety of names, Babsy was the most popular. For us, Babsy was a mixture of Basel babysitter – it had everything “in itself”, it was easy to remember and also very suitable for the graphic layout. We ourselves have always pronounced Babsy in English, i.e. “Bäbsi”, but many also say “Babsi” and for us it doesn’t really matter whether the name is pronounce in English or German or Swiss German – because the most important thing is that (soon) everyone knows what we do. And so that people know who we are and what we do, we invested a lot of time and money in building and designing our homepage as good as possible, with many Information which should be useful for parents and sitters.
In addition to all the information, we have a conversation with all members too, the so-called “onboarding”, with both, caregivers and parents. Here we can get to know each other personally and get a first impression and repeat the most important things.
For us it is important to say in this context: We are and will remain a non-profit and honorary association, in which the association life can also be “designed “lived” accordingly, because exchange with personal contact should take place.
So that’s how we got our name, and we’re proud of it because we’ve known each other since we started and so many people followed. Even if some do not know exactly what we do – many have heard or seen the name, and that’s part of a branding too. It was important to us that our appearance was “fresh” and modern, that makes us very unique as a club and sets us apart from other clubs. We believe that we have a high professional level and a great service despite all voluntary work.
That’s why semi-professionalization is in full swing. And so we hope that you will soon see our beautiful Babsy logo animated – because this is one of our next design projects.
As already mentioned above, we would like to go into “B” like permits too, as in german it is called “Bewilligungen”.
That was a real marathon. If you start small as a club, there were only four of us when Stephanie and Sarah joined, we were very energetic and motivated. During a networking conversation someone told us about the permit for recruitment. Research of course lead us to all information and we immediately found out that such a permit is really necessary as soon as you are in the field of mediation.
We tried to get all the necessary documents together and submitted them. There were a few inquiries and we were finally able to submit all the documents that were necessary. Some time passed, but then we got the approval and were really proud of us, because we are sure that there are enough examples that do not even know about it and this is why we are always happy and willing to give information to support.
More approval marathons then followed. We tried as non-profit association, among other things, also the approval of non-profit status, since this also must and needs to be requested separately. Next came the approval for staff leasing. This we wanted to obtain, because at the time we thought we would have the solution for social security contributions, etc. – however, as it turned out later, during the trial, that was not a solution for hobby-sitting, since other tariffs are available due to staff leasing and they are a lot higher than for a hobby sitter that works every now and then.
We felt that was unfair.
Nevertheless, we decided to get the permit and were able to get Melly into our association. She comes from HR and staff leasing, which was very helpful for us. The whole process took a long time and we had to contribute a lot, including the entry in the commercial register etc. Although we are currently not using the rental service, this is also one of the projects on the Babsy roadmap, which one day should be offered. Especially for parents who do not want to be the employer themselves, this would be the ideal solution.
Today we can solve the social tariff issues with our fiduciary partner, this is our preferred-partner and can take care of these issues on behalf of the parents. With that we have created a unique process that changed the lives of the parents, but also of the sitters, immensely and we are truly proud to have created this. Even if there were numerous sleepless nights and some issues almost drove us insane back than, we always found the solution.
The learnings that we were able to make were incredibly huge. Again, we will be happy to provide information and help other institutions with questions. Legal issues are not always simple, but they are simply part of it and fortunately they don’t always come all at once.
But if we’re finally right: Babsy is the future of childcare, because childcare is a right for all parents, and we put our heart and soul into our fight for a child and parent-friendly world.
That’s it for the letter B for Babsy – “One Name, One Mission”.
Thank you for taking the time and for being part of our wonderful community.
We are already looking forward to the next blog newsletter, where we will share more exciting details
We read each other. Andrea from Babsy