Blog

How often should you update parents during camp and where?

During camp it is absolutely imperative for camps to keep their parents and community updated, but it can certainly become a daunting task when you have to update your internal camp software (campminder, bunk1, etc.), Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and the list goes on. I've posted before about how to best create content during camp, but I wanted to share a few additional tips on how much you should be updating your social entities. 1. Update twice a day, collect content...

Read More

Promoting your camp’s crowd funding efforts

A couple of days ago I wrote about how camps can use crowd funding platforms to raise money. Today I am going to go over a couple of ways that camps should promote these crowd funding efforts. 1. Social media platforms: This seems obvious, but you should heavily promote your project on your own social media platforms. Use photos of camp activities and messaging that clearly describes why you are asking for money and allows your community to connect with your cause. 2....

Read More

Resources on social media and summer camps

I've been reading a lot lately about social media and about summer camps in an effort to always be up to date on various ideas. I wanted to quickly share some books and blogs I've been reading for your enjoyment. Books: How Children Succeed by Paul Tough: This book was recommended to me by one of my camp partners as a great way to learn more about child development at summer camp. It goes in depth on developing non-cognitive skills. So far a...

Read More

What should summer camps tweet?

A few months ago Twitter came out with a great study on the top-performing tweets from the past year. They analyzed over 20,000 promoted tweets to understand what drove the most action among their advertisers. Summer camps can take some cues about what to tweet from their analysis. Here are the four calls to action they found performed the best: #1 Ask for a download: If your camp has a mobile app, this is a great call to action for your tweets....

Read More

Google Search Insights for Camps

Google offers summer camps some great tools for learning more about what prospective parents are searching for. One tool, Google Trends, allows you to see what search terms are being searched for at certain times of the year. The image below shows last year's trend for searches using the following terms: summer camp texas (red), summer camp maine (blue) and summer camp new york (yellow). Understanding Google Search Insights could help you boost your website's traffic. The trend lines show what...

Read More

Updated – Save time by hiring a social media consultant for your camp

Social media marketing for summer camps is a full-time job! In fact, when I built out the chart below to estimate how many hours per month a camp should spend on social media, I was stunned to see my estimations top out somewhere around 55 hours per month! This is why hiring a consultant to do social media is so important. In general, the services of Social Summer Camp can take the time spent down to around 15 hours per...

Read More

Measuring social media success for summer camps

As part of the Social Summer Camp social media program for summer camps, I work with each camp to put together a short, medium and long-term measurement plan. A solid measurement plan is one of the most important aspects of a great social media program. Many summer camps are using social media, but have not figured out how to measure success. If you are running a social media program and not measuring results, try some of these short-term measurement ideas: Using Google...

Read More

Growing your camp is possible with social media

Many camps tell me they aren't interested in social media consulting because they aren't looking to grow their enrollment. While this is a great problem to have, I'm disappointed to hear about camps that aren't interested in growing past their current state. Of course, it is normal for camps to be comfortable with their current size, and it's true that growing a camp past its capacity can be time-intensive and expensive (more staff, more buildings, etc.) But what I want...

Read More