The Parent Experince (Part 2)
When we are asked to talk about the benefits of camp, we talk about the intangible (You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means*) benefits of camp. I do it myself and do so with both passion and pride. When I am talking of the importance of Camp, or when I am giving my camps “elevator speech” to a parent or donors I always talk of the transformation camp brings. I talk of the calls and emails we get from parents that tell us how their camper profoundly changed in only a few short days. I talk about the messages I get from the campers I worked with nearly 25 years ago, and from staff that were with us for a single season, who tell me about how Camp (sometimes I) changed the course of their lives, taught them how to make friends, taught them to resolve conflict, taught them to be better people. I talk of how Camps place a premium on inclusion and belonging and make people feel welcome and a part of something special, I talk about the community we build each year and contrast it with a world that has traded connectivity for real connections. I talk about how we create moments and turn them into memories that last a lifetime. I talk about these things because they are all real and we have the data to support it. But most of all I talk about these things because they are at the heart of what camp is and should be**.
But do these ideas sell even a single week of camp? Do these ideals help our bottom line and allow us to stay in business year after year?
Maybe.
Could our whole approach be wrong?
Perhaps.
The irony may be that what makes summer camp great may not be the same thing as what makes a great camp. These ideals maybe the things that give campers, staff and alumni pride in their camp, they may provide us the evidence that show our own skeptical parents (our own parents not our camper parents) that our work matters, and that our jobs are real jobs, but they may not be the things that get camper parents to fill out the enrollment form. Not the first year anyway.
We all focus on the wrong things from time to time. It’s human nature to put our energy into the spaces in which we are most comfortable and try and ignore the difficult bits.
But this is becoming a systemic issue in camping. Part of the problem is how and who we hire. Initially we hire almost anyone and the ones that are great at motivating hot, and tired kids, when they too are hot and tired get to come back for another year. The ones that don’t slump that second year we often promote in their third year and make them supervisors. We then give them little to no training as supervisors and hope it works out. Those that survive supervising, and gain enough experience over the next few years get one of those few coveted positions as year round staff.
Even when we hire for the second and third year we are not always hiring the best, we hire the ones that can afford to work one more summer. (I have a whole rant on this for another time) The plus side of this process is we end up with some incredible skilled, creative and resourceful staff. Staff who have developed a laser sharp focus on the importance of our programming for campers. Sadly when these staff receive promoted positions that is where their focus remains. I want to argue that as administrators their, and our, focus should not be on programming but elsewhere.
Our staff, our boards, our alumni, our donors but most of all our parents also need our attention and we need to find staff that are equally capable of developing these relationships. After all is it not our parents that pay the campers fees?
The camper experience is of course vital to a camps financial health. But I have learned that truly successful camps, camps that outpace their peers in long term growth, enrollment and reputation have given equal, and at times greater focus to the experience of parents.
Because of this hiring process a good camp will almost always have an excellent camper experience. Kids are after all kids, they are going to find ways to have a great time no matter what. I have visited tiny, underfunded camps in the inner city, Camps that don’t charge to enroll, Camps that are using free spaces and only have donated resources and the kids at these camps are having a fantastic time. The staff at these camps have created a structured space that allows kids to be themselves. Given the space to explore kids will always have a blast. Any body who has given a young child a gift in a large box knows that the child sees the creative possibilities in the box long after the draw of the new toy has worn off.
Our Camper parents are less easily pleased. If they were to come to camp and find the whole camp playing with discarded packaging they would go nuts, (Unless you call it STEM and then they would be marginally happier)
Parents are making a major financial investment by sending their child to camp. Often their kids’ summer experience will be in place of their own summer trip. So we need to make sure that they feel that this experience is valuable. That they are getting something in return for their investment. They need to feel transformed, nurtured and inspired too. They need to feel part of the growth journey of their Campers. Yet they are at best an afterthought, often they are seen as the opposition.
Camps spend tens of thousands of dollars on the latest “in” activity, or invest year after year in a wow factor to help market their program but won’t invest in better software with a more intuitive front end experience, a website that takes the stress out of the parents experience, or staff that can reply to an email in a timely manner. Many of us are parents ourselves. We expect to be informed about every aspect of our kids lives but wont spend the 15 to 20 minutes each day to send an update to our camp parents.
We need to engage parents and invite them to become apart of their campers experience. As Camp Directors we have to prioritize the parents experience. We want them to be comfortable sending their kids to our camp. We want them to be excited for their children. We want them to leave camp after drop off feeling their kids are safe and cared for and that they are good parents for choosing our camp. We should want them to engage with us and email us, we should want them to ask questions and we should be happy to give detailed and reassuring replies, quickly and late into the evening. We want them to feel cared for and important too.
If we have done our job they should be excited to pick up their camper. We should greet each of them and ask them if they had a relaxing and quite week because we want to remind them that a part of their camp experience is a quite home. We want them to share their camper’s successes and we should want to celebrate with them. We want them to share in their campers pride and ownership of their camp. We want them to tell their friends about camp and we want them to come back, and bring another family with them. But we don’t.
We laugh about “that parent”, we think dealing with them is taking time away from our real job. This has to stop. The Camp Mechanics largely came about because of the frustration I feel when I visit Camps and the directors I talk too that feel the parents are the problem, lamenting how they are not like they used to be, that they have changed. (They have, and we need to deal with it.) I would go to conferences and listen in horror to crazy war stories about how camps have dealt with a “crazy parent”, right before they ask for help reversing their declining revenue and enrollment.
I struggle with parents too. Especially in recent years, but we need to be empathetic to them and their needs. However “crazy”. The story of my time at my MD camp is not just a story of rapid growth in revenue and enrollment it’s a story about a group of people realizing this is the missing piece to the puzzle. Our fortunes changed only after we made a concerted effort to change the parent experience. I had under gone the same transformation at my prior Camp but this time it was much more intentional.
So how do we become more parent focused?
Camps need to take an omni-channel approach to parent experience. What do I mean? We need to engage with them everywhere they are, rather than channeling them into our preferred platform. We need to respond to them through the channel they used, and only change channel with permission. In other words, we need to monitor our phones, our emails, our text messages and our social media and engage them there. When they contact by using a comment on Facebook post we need to reply to that commensta nd then ask permission to contact them through a direct message on Facebook. We dont look up there email on facebook and email them. WE stay on the channel they approached us. If the call us, we call them back. If they call us we don’t email them, or use a smoke signals, we call them. In addition we need to be projecting the same message through each channel.
Here is the answer to the test in advance. We need to be projecting a message of safety and competency rather than fun and some granola sounding “intangible”* benefit.
So what does this look like
In MD and again In Tampa. Our efforts focused on parent engagement across every conceivable platform. But it began with the way we answered the phone in the office – staff where instructed to answer all questions on the first call, but also anticipate any further problems and answer those too. If a parent calls about drop off times we would give them the times, but also tell them that we can’t reserve bunks and top bunks fill up first. We would tell them that we have limited parking so if they show up early there may be a brief wait for them to be able to drive into the center of camp, but if they showed up at 3pm there would be no wait but maybe no top bunks. Parents were grateful for the additional information. We focused on single call resolution. This means no one should need to call back, or be called back. We had to train everyone to be an expert on camp.
In Tampa we explained the drop of process. This led to us creating a separate process for first time campers. This was an extra step for us and the camper but really it was to reassure the parents of first time campers, that there camper was safe and cared for.
We clarified language in our promotional literature on and offline. Overnight, sleep away and residential camp was being used interchangeably so we settled on one; overnight. We created internal rules as to when to capitalize Camp or camper. We removed “Camp Jargon” and replaced it with clear English. we reduced the reading age of all out material to that of a 5th grader. These changes were minor but it made our promotional literature much easier to read, and the emails and calls declined because people were finally reading things.
We clarified refunds and cancellations policy, reduced the medication paper work, and removed as many barriers to signing up as possible. We removed sign up forms from the brochure to nudge people to signing up online or over the phone where we had more control over the information.
At open houses we gave more information than was required. We better explained our cell phone policy and then we enforced it. We explained to parents the benefits of not having friends share a cabin, as cabin requests were getting out of control and parents were leaving thinking that there child was going to be miserable that we couldn’t honor a request. By promoting the benefit of not having a friend in their cabin in advance parents where keen to have their child try an “independent experience.”. We explained that 10 year old boys would loose all their socks, parents stopped being upset with us about missing clothes and instead shared in the joke. We showed them where the kids could hang their wet towels and then told them that they would instead but them on top of their clean clothes. Parents laughed and gave us understanding smiles. We explained the way veteran parents sent their kids with two bags. One for clean clothes and one for dirty clothes and the kids dressed from one and undressed into another. Parents felt like they were insiders.
We explained that we couldn’t let all the 13 year old girls take a 30 minute shower. We did this simply by walking people through the math each tour. 16 Girls, two showers, that’s 4 hours a day showering, for hours they could be doing the activities they were sending them to camp for. Parents laughed, they got it. Where previously we had complaints about unfair expectations on the girls, parents helped us reinforce the notion of shared sacrifice on behalf of a larger community.
It took time but complaints went down. Satisfaction went up. So did enrollment. During this time we changed very little about the actual program. We simply better informed parents. Improving their overall experience.
We used our social media platforms more intelligently. No longer was it an extension of our website. We didn’t use it to sell camp. We used it to sell the experience of camp – to parents. We knew that no self-respecting camper was on Facebook so we never used it to communicate with them. Facebook was for parents. Instagram was used to communicate to staff and alumni. We placed targeted native content on each site that built a feeling of Family, Friendship, and Belonging. We promoted the idea of camp as a second home. We knew this was working when a first time parents got out of their cars and said they felt like they belonged at camp, they felt like they were coming home. Then another got out and said the same. This was repeated all summer, then year after year. People started to repeat the language we were using online back to us. The message was working. Soon when a returning campers family got out of their car we didn’t welcome them to camp we welcomed them home.
We used #TBT and #FBF to target a very narrow group of people. Focusing on three distinct groups.
We posted pictures of staff from the mid 90’s because people in college at that time were now the parents of camp age kids of their own.
We posted pictures of campers from the late 80’s as the parents of many of our camp kids were kids during this time,
Staff from the early 70’s as we learned were now grandparents and sending there grand kids to camp and this was when they worked at camp.
It wasn’t that these people would see themselves in the pictures. It was that the clothes, the hair and the references to music would remind them of their own time at a Camp. We were selling a nostalgia for camp. Short of rubbing parents down with a mildew soaked towel to give them that “Camp Smell” when they arrived at camp we did everything we could to immerses them in the camp experience. We wanted to get them thinking about their time at Camp and get excited rather than nervous about dropping off their kids.
The more we focused on parents the higher all our Key Performance indicators climbed. We added pictures online, more content on Facebook, daily update emails, year round camp updates, the better we engaged parents the higher our revenue, our enrollment, our multiple camper family’s, our multiple week campers, our NPS.
All these improvements were at almost zero cost. (subscriptions to Hootsuite, Flickr, and Constant Contact was all we spent on parent experience). Our Camper experience remained 1st class, but it always had been. It just wasn’t driving sales. We made parents feel special. We made them feel like good parents for sending their camper to us, and sales expolded.
We tweaked all we could to bring parents on board. Camp needs to examine their parents experience from first contact to returning for a second year and make this process as smooth as possible. Ironing out the wrinkles in this process pays huge rewards with no real cost. Parents will soon feel the same way about your camp as their kids do.
**If we can describe these benefits so clearly then they are not intangible.
Take Action
Start compiling a frequently asked question list. Find a way to better educate parents on these reoccurring issues. Look for a theme among the questions and start providing more clarity in advance
Keep a list of parent complaints. Does a pattern emerge and how can you act to prevent them before they become complaints.
Too many parents are in a cold war of one-upmanship with their Facebook frenemies and need something to post online to prove to themselves and others that they are great parents. Give them something.
