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by Rob Carmichael and Shane Miskin
In 1998, 14 percent of ACA-accredited camps rented their facilities to
groups. By 2003, that same statistic rose to 53 percent. Conference centers
have seen significant increases in the number of groups served each year
and the number of people within the groups. Kurt Podeszwa, director of camping
and outdoor programs at Timber Pointe Outdoor Center in Hudson, Illinois,
estimates that his center’s operations have grown by more than 75
percent over the past ten years.
A basic need for these growing operations is data storage and retrieval.
How do you keep track of all these people? Growth results in the need to
process information more efficiently. You can manually produce contracts,
schedules, meal planners, and invoices if you host five groups per year,
but it becomes unmanageable when you host one-hundred groups. A strong database
or management software is essential.
Conference and outdoor centers are unique in that they are not quite summer
camps and not quite hotels — and they need their software to answer
some specific questions.
Do You Have Space?
How long does it take you to answer prospective clients when they call
to ask if you have room for them? A good database will present a clear graphical
representation of the data you have entered. Registrars and directors want
to see a calendar view that displays the number of groups and people on
site each day, in addition to availability in accommodation. As Micky Denig,
business manager of Camp Speers-Eljabar YMCA in Dingmans Ferry, Pennsylvania,
puts it, “We need to have an on-screen calendar that tells us whether
we have room or not so that we can make a decision right away.”
If a preferred date is fully booked, you need to quickly respond with
an alternative. A superior on-screen calendar has the ability to display
this information in an elegant way. So, if you’re still rummaging
through the filing cabinet or drawing calendars on the whiteboard, it’s
time to look for something better.
Booking Resources and Accommodations
If you have multiple groups on site at one time, you need to be able to
schedule the use of your cabins, meeting rooms, staff, equipment, and facilities.
Again, this is where your database can present a calendar-style graphical
representation that displays what is booked and what is available. A good
system automatically checks for double-booking, easily helps you reshuffle
accommodations, and produces group schedules and resource schedules.
Contracts, Invoices, and Confirmation Letters
Data re-usability is the single greatest advantage of a good database.
Once you have entered the data, you should be able to use it to produce
all the documents associated with booking and invoicing a group. Your site
rental agreement can be a combination of your contract and confirmation
letter — outlining charges, deposits, accommodations, meals, and terms
of use — with the group’s information already filled in.
Your Kitchen Will Love You
Coordinating meals for groups generates the same mayhem as feeding a summer
camp full of campers — one group has a dozen vegetarians; another
has an individual with a severe allergy to nuts; and a third wants to have
breakfast an hour early because they’re going on an all-day hike —
for which they also want a packed lunch. Great customer service is about
paying attention to detail. Take advantage of your database — use
it to store the details.
You are already recording arrival and departure dates, first and last
meals, and the number of people in each group. From this basic set of data,
your database can automatically generate a default meal plan for each group
— breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snack — all at your usual times
— for all the days that the group is there. Then it’s ready
for you to customize. Type in the unique requirements for each group —
change the time of the early breakfast, make a note for the vegetarians,
record the nut allergy, change the lunch to a packed lunch, and you’re
done.
With the meal plan entered, you can reuse that data. Include that information
on the group’s schedule, the confirmation letter, and the contract
— and in a great report for the kitchen so they know exactly who and
what they need to prepare for on any given day.
The Detail Is in the Numbers
Outdoor, conference and retreat centers have a wide variety of price structures
— package rates such as two nights/five meals, daily use rates, per
meal, per room, per person, different rates for profit versus nonprofit,
rates for specific resources used, and so on. Suffice it to say that your
management software must be flexible enough to allow you to apply multiple
rates for the same service and easily move between variable and fixed charges.
Your system should produce the broad spectrum of financial reports from
invoices, accounts receivables, and deposit journals to revenue summaries.
The Mailing List
When it comes time to send out a mailing, you will already have a perfect
mailing list — absolutely no editing should be necessary. The idea
is that your database provides you with the structure and organization to
maintain the best possible mailing list every day, so that no work is required
to put it together at the end.
Avoiding duplication is the key to a quality mailing list. Something is
wrong if you need to enter the same address more than once — even
if a group registers again for the next year. A well-structured database
will recognize that a single group may come year after year. A church or
a school seldom changes its address, so why should you ever need to enter
it more than once?
Your database should also provide you with the ability to keep track of
the contacts associated with each group, their role within the group, and
all the information required to contact them.
Here is an example: you have a new environmental education program and
a new glossy brochure to go with it. You want to send a mailing to all school
groups that visited your center in the last twelve months to tell them about
it. If it takes you more than a minute to generate a set of mailing labels
for this list, something is wrong.
Intuitive Software and Solid Support
Ideally, your software should be so easy to use that anyone could sit
down in front of it and know how to use it — the software should invite
data entry. Matt DeMoss, business manager of Camp Tecumseh YMCA in Brookston,
Indiana, notes that “user-friendliness is a key aspect because training
many people over time needs to be considered.” But even the best software
will require some technical support from time to time. Technology changes,
hardware needs replacing, and operating systems need upgrades. You will
need support and training for your software. Good software backed by a good
company will be a great tool for your organization for years to come.
Originally published in the 2004 September/October
issue of Camping Magazine.
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