Hello camp evaluators! Welcome to Part 3 of my series on measuring enrollment. When I started this series, I believe I had in mind that it would be a single blog, but that blog extended into two and here we are at Part 3. The fact that this series has blossomed like this is an indicator of the thing we are dealing with — enrollment as a concept is more expansive and complex than it might seem.

To truly understand if you are serving campers in the ways you hope, you need to look at enrollment from several different angles.

Enrollment represents the number of campers we serve — but, as straightforward as that sounds, it’s not. 

Before I get started, I have a confession: I lied. I said in the title that in this post I was going to introduce you to a new friend, but that’s not entirely true. The Camp Program Quality Staff Checklist is not in fact new: it’s been available (for FREE!) on the ACA website for almost ten years. But it is likely new to some of you, and I’m going to discuss some new ways to use it, so the use of the word new is not entirely misleading. Now on to business.

This blog is about a special double issue of the Journal of Youth Development focused entirely on camp research.

In the ninth episode of CampWire, ACA's director of research Laurie Browne talks with another researcher, and longtime camp friend, Jim Sibthorp about ACA's 5-year research study.

Young people are diverse and dynamic, and they have myriad pathways to success. Unfortunately, youth development research often highlights watered-down averages of sample sets that offer limited insight and inspiration, in part because they don’t represent the youth that organizations serve.

The research party has started, but, like most parties, the research project is most impactful when everyone at the party is engaged, giving and taking in equal parts so the entire community party benefits.

Simply by being more intentional about assessing your program, and using existing research to sharpen your focus onto the things that matter most, you may be surprised by just how easy it is to make meaningful changes.