Goldfish Swim School started with one pool and a mission to teach children how to swim in a safe, fun and confidence‑building environment. As the brand grew, that mission resonated with families across North America and their over 200 locations. Each of their schools represents a community of families gaining access to life‑saving skills, underscoring a scalable franchise model with strong brand trust at its core.
In this franchise system, ensuring every location’s social media stays on‑brand while reflecting local stories is crucial. To find a platform that meets both national (franchisor) and local (franchisee) needs, Goldfish partnered with Flamel.ai. They ran a 30-day beta test with a group of 20 franchisees, using Flamel to run their organic social media content and strategy, while adding localized flair.
Here’s what we accomplished in just 30 days.
The Challenge: Keeping All Pools & Socials Aligned
While many franchise social tools offer baseline publishing and reporting functionality, they lack the robust reporting and content‑repurposing functions franchisees need. Franchisees often find it difficult to identify top‑performing posts or replicate successful content across their locations.
Multi‑location franchises like Goldfish also face a broader challenge: keeping social media consistent yet locally relevant. As Flamel notes in a separate case study, localized marketing can triple engagement and boost revenue per location.
To achieve that, franchises need tools that increase local engagement, grow each location’s social presence and maintain brand integrity while allowing local customization. Goldfish’s franchise team wanted a platform that could offer those benefits and provide granular analytics so franchisees could understand what works.
The Solution: Localized Social Content with Flamel
Flamel’s organic social platform stands out for several proprietary features:
Top Performing Content (TPC): This is a library of the best‑performing posts across your franchise network. Franchisees can browse and re-share localized versions of these posts to their accounts. TPC makes it easy to repurpose high‑engagement videos, educational content and trending reels. In fact, Genevieve Coulson, Goldfish’s Director of Social Media, said that this was a favorite feature of the franchisees.
"All participants said that Top Performing Content and how easy it was to use was their favorite feature and was their favorite thing (in Flamel),” Coulson said. “It was our most-loved feature."
Personalized onboarding and support: Each school scheduled its own onboarding session, and the Flamel team provided continuous support throughout the pilot. This individualized approach was especially valuable in a franchise system with varying levels of social media expertise.
“Everyone had a direct line of contact with someone from Flamel to get help,” said Coulson. “Within a franchise system, it’s common to have different levels of expertise, but Flamel’s onboarding and user experience was one of the easiest I’ve ever seen!”
Granular analytics: Flamel’s reporting surfaces keywords, hashtags and other granular data that other tools don’t capture as cleanly and simply. Franchisees noted that Flamel’s metrics were stronger than its competitors, and that Flamel maintains brand consistency at scale while allowing each location to add its own touch.
“The bottom line was that a lot of people felt like the reporting capabilities and metrics were stronger with Flamel,” said Coulson.
AI‑powered social management: Flamel delivers custom post ideas and templates, automated scheduling and a centralized asset library. For multi‑unit owners managing several schools, Flamel’s library structure was far easier and more streamlined than other systems.
The Results: Stronger Insights & Engaging Content
In just one month, Goldfish Swim School saw several qualitative wins emerge:
Video & trend amplification: The Top Content Library democratized access to top‑performing social content. Franchisees who previously struggled to produce weekly videos could now localize and share proven posts. This not only helped every location share more top-performing content, but it gave everyone the ability to participate in social media trends in real time.
Better reporting: Franchisees consistently remarked that Flamel’s KPI metrics and displays of Earned Media Value were more insightful than other tools. By exposing keyword and hashtag data, schools gained a clearer view of what resonates locally and could adjust their content strategy accordingly.
Streamlined workflows: Multi‑unit owners found that the platform reduced the friction of searching for assets and enabled quick scheduling, saving time for busy operators.
Proof of concept for future decisions: Goldfish’s franchise team viewed this 30-day sprint as an essential “test drive” to evaluate whether a single platform could serve both brand‑level and franchisee needs. Their experience with Flamel did just that, providing invaluable data for comparing tools and planning future social media strategy.
Why This Matters for Franchisors
For franchisors evaluating social media tools, Goldfish’s experience highlights several takeaways:
Balance brand and local needs: Platforms should support national content strategies while empowering franchisees to customize posts for their communities.
User experience matters: In a system with varied social media expertise, onboarding and support can make or break adoption. Goldfish found Flamel’s onboarding to be one of the easiest they’ve experienced.
Data drives strategy: Robust reporting helps franchisors and franchisees alike understand what works. Granular metrics such as keywords and hashtags enable smarter content planning.
Final Takeaways
Goldfish Swim School’s experience underscores how AI‑powered social platforms support franchise networks seeking to grow their digital presence. Even in a short timespan, Flamel AI delivered:
Simplified content repurposing through the Top Performing Content library, making it easy for every school to publish engaging, on‑brand posts.
Flexible, individualized onboarding and continuous support: a hallmark of the Flamel team’s partnership‑oriented approach.
Stronger analytics that outperformed existing tools and provided actionable insights on creative and post performance.
Time savings and more streamlined workflows for multi‑unit owners, demonstrating that the platform can scale with a growing franchise.
When speaking of her team’s full experience with the Flamel beta test, Coulson added the following.
“I think Flamel is immensely valuable from the franchisor perspective. In my role, when I'm looking at a social platform, it’s really important that I can use it at the brand level - that’s far more robust and advanced. But it’s also really important that our franchisees can easily use and get everything they need out of it. They need their own local strategies, and I don’t control that. Flamel helped me evaluate our ability to get their hands on a very valuable social tool.
If you’re a large franchise and you’re trying to put systems in place for hundreds of locations, or if you’re small or have a small team, Flamel’s strength comes down to streamlined workflows and efficiencies that are very helpful and valuable.
With Flamel, we had so many things that got pulled out as big wins.”
Interested in scaling your franchise’s social presence and making content creation easy and effective? Schedule a demo of Flamel to see how AI‑powered social media will make waves for your multi-location brand.
