Occasionally we at CampLeadership.org get emails from Camp Directors across the country telling us about an idea that they have. James Davis, who is with the Vandercamp Center in Cleveland, New York is one of those people. He sent me a polite email asking me to check out a budget and retention tool he created. I checked it out and I was pretty amazed by it. I asked him to write a guest blog post about how he came up with the idea. The following is written by James, along with a link to the tool. Thanks — Mike D’Avria (Executive Editor of CampLeadership.org)
With the handful of camps I’ve worked for, I had a hard time getting a simple answer to what ought to be pretty simple questions.
“How much does our camp profit from each new child that comes?”
“How many campers do we need to bring in from spending X marketing dollars to make it worth it?”
“What is our camper retention rate? How does it impact our bottom line?”
And over time, it dawned on me. Most of us are in camping because we love changing the lives of children, not because we love crunching numbers. I count myself in that category, but I’m also a data guy. I need evidence before making a leap of faith. When I got to the Vanderkamp Center, I decided to answer a lot of these questions for myself. After running some formulas, I realized: this really isn’t so hard. I bet my Dad could make a computer program to automate this so I wouldn’t have to punch things into my calculator over and over with slight adjustments. And he did! I explained to him my mathematical formula, and he tested its accuracy. We worked together to make sure our assumptions were as accurate as possible, and I began to play with it.
When I saw how useful it was, I realized that my camp director friends needed access to it. With customizable fields, it’s easy to see everything from how a smaller camper-staff ratio impacts a camp’s financial future, to the real difference between getting a first year 7 year old camper vs. a first year 15 year old camper. The major benefit for me was being able to come before my board and say, “This is what a camper is worth to us, on average, given our current retention rate. If I can reasonably expect to get 1 new camper, I can justify this campaign.” Developing a marketing budget is a leap of faith for a lot of businesses, but for camps, our customers mean so much to us financially that it’s often crazy to not market our service.
The other eye-opener for me was seeing what a slight difference in retention rate can mean. When I communicate to my summer staff that keeping 5% more campers would give us a surplus instead of a deficit, and give them concrete tools to try and achieve that, it makes a huge difference. Likewise, I can go back to my board to justify an increase in program budget. If that new ropes element can increase retention by just 1% it’s likely to pay for itself over and over again.
If you’re like me, you don’t want to charge blindly into the night spending your camp’s dollars. With evidence to back up your intuition, you can be a lot more confident writing those checks. Your camp board will thank you for the results you produce, and those kids you reach with that extra effort won’t mind, either.
We offer this tool totally for free because we hope to help camps across America promote and market their camps a little smarter. We also hope that some camps come forward to give us their data, that we might refine the tool and make it more useful for us, and for them! Encourage the ACA to offer up their research to our perusal, and we can make this thing account for all sorts of things that currently limit it (it can’t account for referrals, for instance). I can promise you our competitors are using data to drive their businesses, and it’s time that camps do, to!
The link to the tool is here: Summer Camp Retention Analysis Tool.
Please enjoy, and I pray it will help your camp as it has ours!
Vanderkamp Center is a Christian Summer Camp near Syracuse, NY.
