Unlocking the Power of Marginal Gains

Achieving Remarkable Change Through Small Improvements

Creating change at camp can be frustrating, to say the least, especially when you're new, seen as “young”, or feel you have little influence at your camp or within your organization. Camp is a world leader in the "we've always done it this way" mentality, holding camping back and pushing many camps toward insolvency.

I have been lucky in my career; I've either been in a position to make a change or close with a sympathetic boss eager to see a new way of doing things. However, this doesn't mean things have been easy, nor does it mean this was always the case.

Camp is strange beast. I am aware of no other industry where people with no financial stake or any skin in the game have the power to prevent change in the way that camp's alumni staff and campers seem to. Nowhere else does simply being loud and passionate about something you experienced years ago let you stand in the way of change. Maybe the closest example is fans of professional sports.

No industry that I know of allows people who are not shareholders, employees, customers, donors, or investors even have a say in change let alone have a stranglehold over it. Yet, at every camp I have worked at or with, there has been a fear of the alumni's reaction. Their power, whether real or perceived, and our fear of it, is what make change difficult. Yet, we give alumni this power. (A story for another day.) Lets take it back.

Whether it's your supervisor or a powerful alumni presence, it's easy to feel discouraged when others don't see problems or resist change. But here's the thing - you actually have more power to drive change than you realize, even without a fancy title. The key is the aggregate of marginal gains. By focusing on small, concrete improvements that add up over time, you can bring about significant change organically (often without drawing attention to the changes your making). It takes patience and tenacity, but chipping away with tiny wins can transform even stubborn systems and entrenched cultures. So don't let the naysayers get you down. With a marginal gains mindset, you can make meaningful improvements, whether you're an intern or the CEO. Stay positive and know that incremental progress can ultimately reshape even the most entrenched organizations. You've got this! Let's look at how to do it.

I am a huge fan of the sport of cycling. Think Tour de France, but 100’s of races year-round. In the early 2000s, Britain lagged behind cycling powerhouses like France, Germany, and the unbeatable American team. But the new performance director, Dave Brailsford, decided to close the gap with small and cost-efficient improvements. He broke down every aspect of cycling into small components - equipment, nutrition, training, aerodynamics - and improved each by just 1%.

Some of the changes they made seemed ridiculous, like rubbing the handlebars with abrasive material to improve grip, making sure that riders traveled with their favorite pillow so they always had a good night's sleep no matter where they stayed, and later traveling with their mattress so their bed always felt like home no matter which hotel they stayed in.

These tiny gains compounded quickly. Within just a few years, Britain dominated cycling at the Beijing and London Olympics, and Team Sky (the British professional team) won multiple Tours. Dave Brailsford is seen as the godfather of marginal gains.

"The whole principle came from the idea that if you broke down everything that goes into riding a bike and then improved it by 1 percent, the accumulation of marginal gains would achieve the remarkable."

So how do we do this for camp? We need to break camp down into all its component parts and look at where we can improve everything by just one or two percent. If we do this in 100 places, we will have major improvements.

If you have read anything on this website, you know where we are going to start.

Parent Experience

We all want better software, but let's face it, it's not happening. But we can still improve how parents are communicated with.

You send out emails all the time, and based on the questions you get at check-in, it seems that no one reads them. We can improved open rates on emails by thinking about when we have the time to check our own emails and extrapolating this out and assuming this is the same with parents. I found I spent more time reading my emails if I received them after lunch, in that period of digestion when I would have the Itis. I wondered if this was true of parents, turns out that my guess was pretty close.

At my overnight camp, we used Constant Contact to send most of our marketing emails, and we noticed a trend that our open rates were highest on Thursdays right after lunch, but our click-through rates (emails on which people took action and clicked a link) were highest on Tuesday and Sunday mornings. So, when we sent out emails with important information on Thursdays and emails that required actions (like signing up) on Tuesdays and Sundays (these windows might not be the same for you but based on my own experience of reading emails from my daughter's school, this seems to be true).

We send daily updates with a link to photos. When we send these images at around noon, we have noticed the view rates are much higher, and the feedback much more positive than when we send them earlier or later in the day. Why? Because parents like to view our pictures and read about their kids' day while they are scrolling on their phones at lunch. Two tiny tweaks that have given us small but noticeable returns.

I am currently based in Florida, where you can set your watch by summer storms. So, everyone follows the weather and think they are a meteorologist. We track lightning using an online app called Storm Geo. It's pretty cool but expensive. But we get an alert when there is a storm within 8 miles and head for cover.

What we were finding is that as soon as there was audible thunder in our area, or reports online of a storm, parents were calling and emailing to let us know. This took up time and was a bit of a nuisance. We also had the other extreme, parents that would berate us for keeping their kids inside for “no reason.” So, we made a tiny change. Every Tuesday, there are three lines in our daily email that says, "We use an online alert system that notifies us of storms within 8 miles of camp. When we get these alerts, we move inside to stay safe. This can sometimes be frustrating for campers as the sky may seem clear, but there is actually lightning within 8 miles."

It added less than 1% to the volume of our weekly emails, but ALL the calls, emails, and complaints stopped.

We have done similar things with our staff to make their (and ours) experience better. Our staff don't check their emails. But it's a way we send pre-hire information. So, whenever we send an email, we send them a message on GroupMe that says we just emailed you, please check your emails. Open rates from 10% to 100%.

We have realized that our staff struggle filling out their tax forms. So, this year we will be sending out a short 2-minute video that walk them through how to do it. We will be doing this via a non-searchable YouTube link. Maybe 10 or 15 minutes of work that will stop hours of chasing paperwork.

Our staff who identify as female struggled to find comfortable, practical, affordable yet “cute” shorts that meet our uniform standards.  So, we send out links to shorts that have been recommended by our staff. When others find a new pair of shorts or shorts that are on sale, they share the link too.  We are no longer uniform police, everyone is happy.  A small effort by us has added up to happy staff and a happy administration.

We have also removed rules that seemed unfair or arbitrary and tried to reduced paperwork. (No issue has ever been solved by filling out another form.)  But we have listened to our campers and our staff and made 100’s of small changes over the years that have added about $700,000 dollars in revenue with out changing how the program looks or feels.  Its small changes and tweaks that have added up over time that have increase parent, staff and camper satisfaction.  Go through your program and identify the areas where you can make these small adjustments and make them.  No one will notice but they will add up over time and show huge gains.

(Just keeps notes so you can get the credit you deserve.)