As a camp director, you’re responsible for a bevy of essential tasks, from day-to-day planning and administration to overseeing camp employees and monitoring expenses. Balancing these duties can be exhausting and overwhelming, especially if your team isn’t supported with the right camp management software.
Use this simple guide to help streamline management to grow your camp—and set your program on track for long-term success.
Reviewing Your Camp Management Needs
If you’re reading this, there’s a pain in your camp’s current management process. Maybe it’s a clunky account management workflow that takes too long—or a tracking and reporting task for your summer camp that’s hard to keep pace with. You can usually break these pain points down into a handful of categories:
Account Management
Account Management is all about keeping tabs on individual campers and families: managing communication, updating records and maintaining these relationships to keep them happy and enrolled. This process is challenging, involved and, most of all, time-consuming. Your team might struggle with providing refunds—or writing down and sharing account information to keep everyone on the same page.
Thankfully, the best camp management software lets you view, edit and coordinate individual or family accounts with ease. These 360-degree family account management tools allow you to make manual payments, record notes on specific accounts, cancel registrations, provide refunds and so much more. The result? Less stress, admin time and headaches; that’s camp management made easy!
Attendance Management
Attendance Management involves giving your staff the tools they need to record and manage camper presence. Traditionally, camps use shoddy paper forms or basic spreadsheets to take attendance, which is tedious and prone to error. That tired approach also forces your or your team to dig through countless files of attendance data to glean insights, taking time and energy away from more important matters, like the needs of campers and families.
If your team wants a hand with this essential task, be sure to look into camp management software with attendance management features. These tools let you quickly and easily view and manage attendees (even from mobile devices!), leverage participant-level tracking and eliminate paper and printing from your attendance process! They’re an excellent way to lighten your administrative workload and help you focus on your campers instead of annoying forms and spreadsheets.
Performance Tracking & Reporting
Performance Tracking and Reporting helps you understand what’s working with your camp and what’s not. It’s about gathering reliable, actionable data to inform decision-making about the direction your camp should take—and sharing that information with the right people at the right time. Without the correct tools, it’s tough to sift through all the data your camp collects, causing you to miss out on new revenue opportunities and overlook participant needs.
Camp management software with reporting and performance tracking features is a game-changer for your organization. This software effectively mines all of the data your camp gathers during day-to-day operations (from attendance reports to finance forms) and translates that info into easy-to-understand insights. Use these to see objectively how your camp is doing overall—or in specific areas like registrations or finances. Best of all, this solution gives you access to handy filters and reporting tools so you can create, save and share pre-formatted reports in minutes!
Camp Staff & Volunteer Management
Staff and Volunteer Management might be the most essential item on this list. Your employees need a quick, intuitive way to access and share program data to coordinate administrative tasks. The problem? That level of fluidity often comes at the cost of security. Without proper access checks and limitations, your financial data and sensitive camper info become accessible to anyone on the team, from camp managers to temporary volunteers, introducing major safety and security risks.
If you need more control over how your camp’s data is accessed and distributed, look into camp software with staff and volunteer management tools. You can use these solutions to open or restrict administrative and access rights to individual members of your staff. This lets you limit financial and sensitive camper information to only those who need to work on it, keeping this critical data controlled and protected at all times.
Mobile staff management software provides secure access from any location with an internet connection, a great feature for when counselors, instructors and other staff aren’t present in the office. Keep all of your camp’s data safe yet flexible to more effectively run your program, stay in touch with employees and volunteers and relay key information with care and precision.
This blog post is provided by ACTIVE Network. Reach out to ACTIVE today for more on our industry-leading camp management software—and how it can help you save time and boost revenue by streamlining your day-to-day operations. We’ll connect you with a free demo so you can try these tools out for yourself and make sure our tech is the best fit for your unique camp and community.
Periodically, the American Camp Association (ACA) makes timely and relevant information about products and services available to its members so they can make informed decisions for their camps. However, the ACA does not endorse products, services, or companies.
