Preparing Summer Camp Senior Staff - CampHacker #68

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Teaching Counsellors and Staff to Take on Bigger Roles

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Getting one summer’s staff ready for the next summer is a job that takes about a year and a half. As we begin a new camp season we should already be looking at who we should get ready to take on more responsibility the following summer.

In this show (welcome back frequent co-host Paul Sheridan!) we take apart the job of getting people ready to move up. When we started I asked the co-hosts what they do at this time of the year to help their seasonal senior staff understand their responsibilities perfectly but the discussion quickly moved to how far in advance that process really starts.

What do you do to prepare senior-level staff for their summer jobs?

Tool of the Week – Make Yourself a Better Camp Director

Travis - VistaPrint.com
Gab - http://icc2014turkey.org Inter-nation Camping Congress, 23-27 October 2014 Peter Katz Camp Concert/Workshop CA$850
Joe - Buckeye Leadership Workshop - www.buckeyeleadership.com
Paul - Abuse Prevention Systems - abusepreventionsystems.com

 

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Family Camp Programming & Promotion - CampHacker #67

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Building up the Best Family Camp Program

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It was great to have Megan back on the program this week as we come back around to talk about two more elements of Family Camp - Promoting it and Programming for it.   

Thanks to Catalina Island Camps director, Tom Horner, for joining us for the first time on the show!  Check out Catalina Island’s Family Camp that they run in partnership with Jean-Michel Cousteau & the Ocean Futures Society.

In our last Family Camp episode we talked about some of the big reasons why a Family Camp session  (or 3!) would help your summer camp.   On this episode we shared some great ideas of how camps can promote the program.

Now that you have a full Family Camp it’s time to run an amazing program!  

Each director on the panel had amazing ideas for the 3 kinds of programming that you typically see at Family Camp: kids only activities, adult only activities and activities for the whole family to do together.

What’s activity is the biggest hit at your Family Camp?

Tool of the Week – Make Yourself a Better Camp Director

Travis - The Promise of a Pencil 
Dan -  Nutureshock by Po Bronson & Ashley Merryman 
Gab - http://icc2014turkey.org Internation Camping Congress, 23-27 October 2014
Megan - Springpad  https://springpad.com/about
Tom - IST Sports for great snorkelling gear - http://istsports.com

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Last Minute Marketing - CampHacker #66

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Wow! What a great show this week.    

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It is getting to that time of the year when directors get that nervous feeling in their stomach - will we be full or won’t we?    There is still plenty of time to get more kids in camp this summer.   Our co-hosts this week have all been really smart about filling their camp spaces and they were happy to share their ideas.

Dan told us something amazingly useful - Frost Valley targets their style of communication and marketing to reach 5 different audiences.  Each audience gets unique ads, unique calls or unique postcards.   For them these audiences are:

  1. unknown to us - those who know of camp or have looked at the website but we don’t know who they are

  2. families who have made inquiries - these people are “trackable” and we can keep a record of how we have reached out to them

  3. new families - ones whom have registered but haven’t been to camp before

  4. returning families who are registered

  5. returning families who are not yet registered

What are you going to do to fill your camp this year?

Tool of the Week – Make Yourself a Better Camp Director

Travis - Scat Cards 
Dan -  The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Achor
Joel - Wordle
James - fizzle.co

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Treat Your Summer Staff Right - CampHacker #65

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Providing a Special Place at Camp for Your Summer Staff

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We’ve had lots of discussions on the Camp Pros group on Facebook about how we talk to staff about putting their campers first.  I think that is essential to what we do.  

However, it was a great little reminder of our camp director responsibilities when Joel Egbert reached out to me and suggested we focus, for one episode, on putting staff first.   

I often surprised people when I said that my job was not to look after kids - Beth and I believed that our job was to look after the people who looked after the kids - our staff.

On this week’s podcast our co-hosts share some fantastic ideas of ways to make the summer experience wonderful for our staff.

It has to be a huge part of our job - we’ve got to make up for the long hours and low pay.

No, we didn’t talk about having a sundae party. We we’re thinking much bigger than that!

Tool of the Week – Make Yourself a Better Camp Director

Travis - Panasonic Lumix GX-7
Joe - Cool Tools: A Catalog of Possibilities
Gab - Theories of Small Group Development
Joel - Animoto, slideshow creator. 
Topher - Taking the example of popular websites uploaded content to give customers content in similar styles that they are used to. (ex. Look at www.espn.com and www.grantland.com and compare it to the Camp Grey website and Youtube channel.)

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