In our Write For Camp Fall cohort, we asked a question to the group. If opening registration or moving to an early bird deadline, or just promoting that camp is open for business for kids and parents to sign up, what is the appropriate and correct number of emails and/or messages to send leading up to and during the sales window?

Asked two questions.

How many emails is the correct number?

How many would they feel comfortable sending?

These are two different ideas of course. Sometimes the “correct” number is a bit beyond what you would feel amazing about sending.

The room’s guesses fell all within the same range (about). 5 emails over a couple of weeks. Ok, not bad.

The real number? 20.

20 emails over two weeks, increasing in frequency as the deadline approaches.

Now, are camps going to do this? Probably not. Of course not.

But it should at least send a message for how “far behind” many camps are in selling to a crowd of potentially willing buyers.

Now. Writing and planning a full-blown sales sequence can feel overwhelming. So we want to try and make some of that easier.

And to be fair, we wouldn’t tell anyone to send 20 out of the gate. That’s a number taken from higher-level internet marketers who are making their bones on selling digital products and cohorts and services.

[Note: you could move the “to be fair” paragraph up to right after “Of course not.” Your call.]

Knowing What to Write Is the Hard Part

Sometimes the part that’s overwhelming with these series is knowing what to write and how to plan them out.

Makes sense. You don’t want to send emails that just say “EARLY BIRD IS OPEN!!!” or “SAVE $500 RIGHT NOW” over and over again. Agreed. You don’t want to do that.

But then it becomes a problem of what exactly to plan out.

Great news, we’ve got you covered. We’ve written a number of these for different camps for a number of different sales windows. And we’ve distilled those down into a prompt every camp pro can use to outline the bones of a series.

The prompt is set up to interview you about what deadline is approaching, what is important to know about your camp, your window, your offer, and it will push back when the answer is vague.

What the Prompt Tells You You’re Missing

And it’s also going to tell you what you’re missing when you write it.

Things like:

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Every month, we recap the K&E family newsletters we sent the month before. A short summary of each, plus why we wrote it. The point is to show the thinking out even get feedback! (aka - Please let us know how we’re doing.)

October is registration season. The Year of K&E Gear drops a new item every month after a family registers, November 1 is the deadline for the current one, and every send this month carries that somewhere in it.

Four newsletters, all from Jack. Two of them came out of the same trip.

Newsletter 1: Same School of Thought

The message: Jack and Breezy went to Japan. Four days with some of the most thoughtful educators in the world, and they basically confirmed the way camp already works.

This newsletter opens on a legit worry. There’s no report card for camps, and no panel of camp judges showing up in August to score the summer. So for parents, a lot of the job is trusting you’re running it the right way.

Dave and Lynn Kenney, K&E mainstays for years, run the Hakuba International School in Japan and invited Jack and Breezy to the forum they host every year for about 40 educators from around the world.

The Dalton School in Hong Kong was there. So was the Island School in the Bahamas, where high schoolers do real research with scientists and give up their phones for a semester.

All of those schools are trying to take care of a kid’s education and a kid’s well-being at once, for families who want full access to the most selective colleges in the world. Nobody expects a camp to raise anybody’s SAT score, so wellness gets to sit at the center of everything.

Why we wrote it: Partly, it was like, “Hey, look, we went to Japan for this cool thing! Also, it makes the case for how camp operates using somebody else’s credibility, and it was a good reason to get 40 international educators onto the K&E list.

Newsletter 2: Writing College and Job Recommendations

The message: it’s application season, so Jack is writing recommendations right now for former campers and staff, and the list of where they’re headed is the whole argument.

Dartmouth. Wake Forest. Michigan. Skidmore. Art sales. Teaching positions. JP Morgan.

One line from the forum carries the middle: education is really good at doing and not really good at being. Camp is the flipped version, because nobody gets tested and kids are there almost seven weeks. Jack’s version is that it’s as if ice cream was good for you.

The ask at the end isn’t a registration push. It’s whether anybody reading can run a six-week internship in May and June for a former camper.

Why we wrote it: a seasonal task Jack was already doing turned out to be the way into the biggest claim we make, which is where these kids end up.

Newsletter 3: A Camp Where Siblings (Gasp) Get Along

The message: A brother and sister held hands at assembly every morning, because they love each other and love being at camp together.

Noah and Quinn, 13 and 11. Jack’s claim is that K&E might be the best camp in the world for becoming real friends with your sibling, and that it holds at home too.

This came out of conversations with staff and former KE campers who all said they think they got along with their siblings better because of camp. At home, brothers and sisters share an audience, which is their parents, and even in happy houses there’s some competing going on.

At camp that audience is gone for six weeks. What replaces it is wanting everybody to like your sibling. (This came right from those interviews and we said as much.)

This email also had a direct ask. If one kid is at camp and the other isn’t, that’s the part they’re both missing, and younger siblings can start with three weeks.

Why we wrote it: We owed everybody this one. Jack said the sibling thing was his new favorite in the 5 Things I Love About K&E list back in September and promised a story was coming, so here it is.

Also it’s a straight play at second-kid enrollment, which is the least expensive enrollment a camp will ever get.

Newsletter 4: Protect the Sand

The message: Go check out the chart that’s in this email about dopamine. It led to a talk about Covey’s big rocks, and to the idea that the sand has stopped being whatever fills in the cracks.

A kid’s year is already full of good rocks. School, practices, music lessons, rehearsals, family time. Most kids aren’t short on enrichment.

The sand is the hard part to guard, because it just looks like spare time. Rides home, waiting rooms, twenty minutes of down time. If there’s a dopamine hit within reach, the in-between minutes go there.

Camp puts the big rocks in first by default, which is just the camp schedule. Lots of places have rocks.

What camp has is six and a half weeks where the sand stays clean.

Why we wrote it: This one sat in the file since August on purpose, because it reads better in the fall than it would have in July. Also, bending a framework everybody already knows is more fun than restating it.

What October Was About

The asks got more direct as the month went on. The first send ends on a shrug about camp report cards and no ask at all.

By the third one it’s register your other kid, and here’s the session length to start with.

Early October is still earning the read. Late October is close enough to name the deadline.

You got this,

Jack & Doug

Tell me if you recognize these:

Activities

About Us

Our Camp Team

Dates and Rates

Parent Resources

Summer 2027

Alumni

Blog

FAQ

I’m betting that list looks a lot like whatever is sitting in your camp website’s navigation menu. If anything, you have that list and a few other links.

Our Story. Facilities. A Typical Day. Photo Gallery. Packing List. Forms. Tuition Assistance. Getting Here. Employment. Rentals. Donate. Contact us. On and on and on.

Camps, by and large, are a very similar industry.

The “rules” around websites are fairly straightforward. Most of them look similar. Which is to say they all look great! No shade at all on camp websites and who built them. Everyone is working from remarkably similar templates.

But there’s a “problem” with camp websites that I’m starting to think is a bigger issue than we might have realized before.

The simple version is this:

Camp websites, and as a byproduct, camp content, is an entire library of information.

Again, look at that list above. That’s all info.

But that might not be correct. Camps shouldn’t be pushing information. They should be pushing decisions.

The way things are mostly designed now has tons of info stacked and stacked and stacked with the great hope the reader (parents, probably moms) reads it and gets everything they need.

Essentially, throwing everything on the table and hoping the parent sorts it out.

Part of why is sitting in that list up top.

Employment. Rentals. Donate. Alumni. Forms. Packing List. None of those are for a parent deciding anything. They’re for job seekers, off-season renters, donors, and families who already said yes. The parent trying to make up her mind is getting about a third of the menu.

But we need to think about this differently.

I saw this tweet recently, which got me thinking about this.

The idea is that when everything became a store, the internet got worse. Probably true. Camps stayed a library.

But camp websites should be a little more like a store, or at least a lot more like what we see from websites selling experiences.

Because camps are businesses, not libraries.

And businesses are built on customers making decisions; hopefully, those decisions are purchasing something from you or signing up for something, which is a purchase.

This isn’t a change that’s going to come overnight, not by a long shot. The key is to start training yourself to think like someone who is making a decision about what you sell.

You want to push them through a sequence of decisions that bring them closer to trusting you, understanding what you offer, seeing themselves (or their kids) as part of it, and feeling like this is close to a no-brainer.

Even through that lens, do you think your website or what you write about your camp does that?

My guess is no.

So, how can we start? First, look at the place where you get closest, and probably still miss a little.

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We’ve been starting to think of the way we communicate about camp as a need to drive parents towards decisions, while answering the kinds of questions they’re likely to ask (before they ask them).

The problem is, sometimes, we don’t know how to communicate that correctly, or which list to answer.

Well, good news, because I (Doug) saw a tweet this week that outlines it pretty well and pretty clearly.

Check it out:

A Menu for the Blank Page

Leon Abboud’s list solves a lot of blank page problems. Now, he wrote this list for consultants and founders. 14 kinds of content that can get a service business clients, think consultants and founders.

But the list applies to almost anyone and anything, especially where a personal and trust-based business is concerned. Camp is just that. It applies to messages you send, and camps should start thinking about this list where the website is concerned as well.

We are going to post more about website content over the next couple of weeks, having done considerable brainstorming on potential shifts to how camps structure their pages.

Let’s take this list and quickly change it in camp terms.

Here it is, his list, lightly in our words, with one note on the first one.

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Michael Lewis published Moneyball in 2003. It’s usually at the top of the credit list for speedrunning Major League Baseball’s analytics boom. And the credit is mostly fair.

The thesis was simple.

A few stats the old heads ignored, like how often a guy just got on base, turned out to predict winning better than the things scouts had always trusted (like their very flawed eyes).

Moneyball follows the 2002 Oakland A’s, a cash-strapped team that marched into the playoffs with a roster of castoffs and undervalued guys nobody else wanted (on the hitting side, they had a bunch of great pitchers).

And in the story, it kicked off a conversation about statistics and roster-building that still runs most of baseball today.

But for a book about analytics, Moneyball isn’t a book about stats.

You won’t find spreadsheets or datasets or code, even though spreadsheets and code were exactly what Billy Beane and his front office were using to build the team.

What Moneyball has, is Billy Beane.

A Book About Stats With Very Few Stats In It

Beane is essentially the main character, though many other personalities show up here. The math of the game is important, but is almost a side plot.

We enter the Moneyball world world wanting to know more about him, and leave nodding our heads that analytics trumps the eye test.

It’s not an easy task, but it was an effective one. And it’s worth sitting with if you run a camp. Lewis used Billy Beane, and some others, to tell the story of how analytics changed baseball.

This strategy is a big part of why Michael Lewis books work. They are all about bigger ideas like Wall Street bond shenanigans of the 80s (Liar’s Poker), the importance of NFL offensive lines (The Blind Side), the 2008 financial crash (The Big Short), the crypto crash (Going Infinite).

All of them deal with very big ideas or revolutions or historical inflection points through the lens of the people involved.

For Moneyball, Beane was a perfect choice. A former first-round pick and “tools” guy, a highly touted prospect where all scouts were concerned who flamed out as a player. Beane didn’t work out as a player precisely because he was the kind of bet the analytics (had they existed at the time) would have told you not to make.

The face of MLB’s stat revolution was a dude the analytics nerds would have benched. Lewis built the book around the charismatic human in the room who believed in the work.

That choice is why people who don’t care about baseball read it anyway.

What This Has to Do With Camp

We’ve written before about Harry, not Hogwarts.

It’s not enough to describe the place if the person you’re talking to can’t picture themselves inside that place. The same marketing and communication “problem” lives one level up.

It’s not enough to talk about the ideas of a camp, the values, the weeks of growth, the confidence, the friendship, the whatever without a protagonist moving through them.

Parents don’t naturally attach to the concept of camp if they haven’t themselves been to camp.

They attach to a kid who went, a counselor who stayed ten summers, a director who picks up the phone herself.

Camps often try to make the case through pictures, brochures, and websites (which are basically just online brochures). Camps pile on activity lists and session descriptions and traditions that have been around for 100 years.

That’s the stats with no Billy Beane. That’s Hogwarts without Harry.

Yeah, sometimes it looks cool or seems relevant, but it’s hard to start caring about.

Some of the human part you can cover with social proof. Parent quotes and reviews do real work, and most camps collect fewer of them than they should.

But, in the end, a quote is a data point. The rest is story, and a story needs somebody to happen to.

Who Carries Your Story

I don’t know what the Moneyball moment looks like for the whole camp industry. Somebody should probably write that book. It won’t be me.

But I know what it looks like for one camp, because that version is smaller and it’s yours. It’s a question.

Who are the people you can tell the story of your camp through?

The homesick nine-year-old who’s running morning announcements by second session.

The kid who stood up in front of the camp at a talent show and sang her heart out.

The teenager who said how much they loved being off their phone for a few weeks.

The counselor who showed up as a shy camper a decade ago and now runs your waterfront.

The parent who didn’t get camp at all and has a kid who won’t stop talking about.

Those are your Billy Beanes. The values and the outcomes ride along behind them.

Pick one person this week. A person with a name and even the tiniest of arcs.

Write 300 words about what camp looked like through them. Where they started, what was hard, who they were by the end of the summer.

Don’t mention your facilities. Don’t list your activities. Let the camp show up as the place this just happened to happen.

When we put a face on something, even the most confusing thing (like hardcore quant data analytics) can seem interesting, and even inspiring.

Because it’s about a person. And people are what matter.

You got this,

Jack & Doug

This past week I was working with a camp on a follow-up email for a live event they had run for interested families.

Wanted a good, quick message we could send to that group that would basically say thanks for coming while also giving just enough info about the camp to make sure it would stick in everyone’s mind.

And that’s how Camp by the Numbers was born.

I didn’t invent numbers (I wish), but I do think they are one of the most effective ways to tell a “story” about something quickly and memorably.

The great news, camp is full of numbers to use for this. And piling them together into one message does tons of work for the prospective parent interested.

Immediately after finalizing that email for the other camp, I went over to Kenwood & Evergreen and Jack and I did the same for this camp. Some of these were already on the website, but there were a bunch more to find. In fact, there were so many to use, that eventually we just cut it off.

Here’s how the email looked.

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You probably write (important) things on a computer. Everyone reads on a phone.

I’ll repeat.

You probably write (important) things on a computer. Everyone reads on a phone.

If you remember nothing else about writing for your camp (or business, or social media, or whatever) remember nothing else about writing a camp email, remember that one line that I wrote twice.

We’ve become a broken record about it, and are fine with that, because so many people still get it wrong. See it everyday in stuff that lands in my inbox.

You sit at a laptop (or gasp, desktop) and type something you’re oh so very proud of. It looks clean and balanced on that big old screen of yours.

Then the reader opens it one-handed, in a pickup line, on a phone (though definitely not driving, no one does that). Roughly 85% of your list is reading it that way, and that number is only going to go up. The words are all the same words, but the screen changed. And now, the message you’re proud of might look like a brick wall of text.

Hit Enter, and then Hit Enter Again (and Again)

Good news is the fix is mostly mechanical and you can start this morning, or whenever you read this.

Start and think only about with white space. The simplest version of the advice is to hit enter more than you’re used to. We will write longer chunks of text, feel good about the output and then simply hit enter a few times.

After a sentence.

Mid-paragraph.

One word.

See my point? It’s all good. On a phone, a little too broken up is about right.

One idea per paragraph. Max. Whatever your HS English teacher told you (Hey Ms. Moore!) about topic sentences and three supporting details, you can punt on. School did you no favors here.

Five paragraph essays, thesis statements, position papers, none of that is how anyone reads now, and the muscle memory isn’t going to win internet readers.

I saw a screenshot of an email from a writer I genuinely love. He’s a fantasy football guy and this is peak season. Smart dude and beyond elite at his subject.

On my iPhone in the gmail app, there are tons of unbroken blocks of text, top to bottom. He has so much to say, but so much of it gets lost to the wandering eyeballs of the mobile age.

Write for the Skim, Did You Skim to this Point?

People aren’t often reading a camp email top to bottom. They skim down it, hunting for something that pulls them back in. When they find it, they loop back to where that idea started and actually read.

So give them places to stop and places to loop back to.

A single sentence on its own line.

A question dropped in the middle (what happened next?).

A header every few paragraphs, which does a shocking amount of work, because a skimmer reads the headers first and decides which chunk is worth their time.

Give the eye an anchor too. A bolded line, an italic, a “short quote”. Anything that makes a thumb pause.

When something runs long, think in a 1-3-1 shape. One line to set it up. Three to carry it. One to land it.

That isn’t a perfect science but it gives the eye a rhythm to follow without working for it.

Format Beats the Writing Now

I’ve landed somewhere that still feels a little wrong to type. The visual side has crested into being a little more important than the writing itself.

I like writing. I like a good sentence. But most people can’t even make the translation from “I wrote this on a computer” to “this gets read on a phone,” so the sentence never gets its shot.

You still have to be good with words to make the whole thing land. You just never reach the words if the format scares people off first.

(The subject line and first two lines are their own animal, and worth most of your time. We wrote about that in The First Line Should Be the Best Line. This one is about everything after they open.)

Try This

Don’t write anything new for this. Take something you already have.

Pull up your last email, or a page on your site (camp blogs often have a HUGE problem with this), or a post you wrote months ago.

Open it on your phone first, before you touch it, so you see exactly what a parent sees.

Then make four moves.

1. Add two headers.

2. Hit enter until each paragraph is one idea.

3. Bold the single line you most want someone to catch.

4. Cut your longest paragraph in half.

Send it to yourself, preview it on mobile and read it on your phone. If you get through it without pinching to zoom or sighing, you’re most of the way there.

Then make the mobile preview a habit, not a one-off. Run it on everything you send. It catches the text problems and the image ones both. The more you get comfortable writing for the way people actually read now, the more they read you.

You got this,

Jack & Doug

When we are looking at where new campers come from, it’s not necessarily a mystery as much as it is a grab bag.

And I’ve talked to enough camps over the years that this isn’t just an us problem. It’s the number one thing camps are trying to solve.

Different places go about it all different ways.

You’ve probably tried some combination of home visits, city meetups, camp fairs, Google ads, social media, open houses, referral agencies, podcast guesting, lead magnets, Instagram reels, a table at the town street fair, donating a session to a school auction.

It’s like a shotgun approach to anything they think will work, anywhere they can be to start the conversation with a new family.

But when you ask for metrics on these approaches, good data on what works and what doesn’t, that’s harder to come by.

Oftentimes it’s just a feel or a sense of what’s working and what’s not.

Nobody Is Sitting Around Doing Nothing

Worth saying, because the easy read on all this is that camps are passive about new families. Not it at all. Like at all.

The effort is there, and the variety of approaches is genuinely impressive. Ask 20 camps what they’re doing to reach families who’ve never heard of them, and you’ll get 20 different lists (sometimes a mix-and-match approach), most of them longer than you’d guess.

But the next part doesn’t always have great answers. Namely, what’s the data behind each approach?

Not whether it felt worth doing, but how many families came in from it and how many of those ended up enrolling. Ask what a month of Google ads costs per inquiry. Ask what the pop-up box on the website converts at.

Those numbers are often harder to come by. Or don’t exist at all.

It Depends a Lot on the Camp

Of course it’s different depending on the camp. Sports specialty camps, religious camps, camps with very specific missions or goals, that’s a little more identifiable.

Not necessarily easy, but identifiable. If your families are all coming out of a specific community piece or one sport, you have some idea which rooms they’re standing in.

But traditional sleepaway camps? What is the funnel? What is the top?

A traditional camp’s answer to who it’s for is something close to a kid who would love camp. Which is the actual product, and is also not a place you can drive to.

Camps Measure Everything Else

Camp people are not allergic to numbers. A director can tell you how many kids are enrolled for next summer, and what that number was on the same date last year, without looking anything up.

Retention comes with a percentage and a theory about why.

The one thing so many say is their biggest problem is the one thing running on feel.

I don’t think that’s a math problem. I think the top of the funnel is the hardest place in the entire business to attribute anything to anything.

A family who shows up in January might have heard about you at a street fair in September, from a cousin in 2019, or off a reel they don’t remember watching.

By the time they fill out the form, whatever actually moved them is three steps back and invisible.

So you do all of it. And then you keep doing all of it, because you can’t prove which part you’d be safe to stop.

But thinking about this part of the business, and working to quantify it is going to be a meaningful next step for the whole industry.

You got this,

Jack & Doug

“Alumni don’t want an email about my take on Gaga once a week, but they do want to know when the theater is getting built.”

Jack Schott, 10/12/26

This is a quote about camp. But this is also a quote about a much bigger “problem” camps face, which is all of the contacts you have that have been built up over the years, but now fall into all of these different groups.

Let’s call them segments, because that’s what everyone in the email world would call these.

Look at all the segments camps have.

Enrolled. Not yet enrolled. Hot leads. Cold leads. Staff. Alumni. Alumni who used to be staff. Staff who used to be campers.

It’s exhausting just looking at this list.

And yet, here we are, staring at this incredible asset (contact information for people who either are attending, have attended, or maybe want to attend camp).

We puzzled this out the other day in an effort to make sense of our overall strategy for writing.

The good news: tons of content, voice locked in, lots to say, a cadence that works, people used to hearing from camp often.

The so-so news: the growing sense that we were playing a little fast and loose with what we were sending and to who.

So we talked for a long time about this. And think we came up with a plan.

We Don’t Segment Enough When We Send

That’s Jack’s, from the call. “The list is not well segmented, or maybe it is, maybe it’s better segmented now, but we don’t segment when we send.”

His read on what it costs us: “Part of it is we have to water down the takes to serve too many audiences. We basically don’t gas up the alumni, like, this place is so cool, in 1988 when, we don’t do that because we have a list of a whole bunch of people that aren’t alumni.”

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So a couple of weeks ago we were on a call with a client who had gotten a response to something we wrote. He had a not-so-chill look on his face, which gave the sense that something was wrong.

There wasn’t anything wrong. But he had a concern.

Him: …In a related matter, I actually got an email yesterday that was forwarded from an organization we just joined. [...] It actually was a response to the piece that we just published.

Me: (without waiting to hear about the reply) Oh, nice. That’s great!

Him: Well, great and not so great. [...]

Me: Unless it’s something like a lawsuit, a cancellation, or something definitively negative, a reply is great.

Him: [Reads me the “negative” email, which is really mostly positive with a callout about 1-2 lines in there that this person took the wrong way.]

Me: I stand by what I said. This is great!

Putting anything out into the world is a vulnerable thing. Making a call, writing a newsletter, putting up a social post, making a marketing video, all of it means doing something and hoping the world responds in some positive way.

Oftentimes, no one responds at all. Maybe you’ll see metrics on views or open rates or link clicks and you’ll have to make a best judgment about whether something was “successful”.

Sometimes someone will write a comment or even hit reply and write you something.

Anytime this happens, as far as I’m concerned, it’s a positive thing. Because it gives you incredible signal. And that’s even if the person writing back was a bit miffed, or nonplussed or not exactly pumped about what you wrote.

Four Things Have to Happen Before a Reply Shows Up

A reply is expensive for the person sending it. You need them to sit down, have a thought, type it out, and hit send. Almost nobody does all four of those things.

That’s a main reason it’s worth something. They read it. They had a reaction. And the reaction was strong enough to survive all four steps.

Where I learned this was running my last company where we had a ton of content and a readerbase who had tons of emotion wrapped into it (it was sports-based). We would get some angry stuff back. And we started answering every single one of them the same way.

Thank you so much for reading.

Then, okay, now I’m going to address the total Looney Tunes thing you just said. But first, thank you for reading, because that part is actually meaningful to me.

Nine times out of ten the person wrote back a second time with some version of “oh, sorry, that’s not what I meant.” Killing them with kindness worked basically every time, and it changed how I think about communication in general.

The Forward Is Worth Even More

The email up top is actually the better version of this, and it took me a second to see it.

Somebody didn’t just read that piece. They read it, thought of a specific other person who ought to see it, and sent it along. Then that person cared enough to write back. Both of those things had to happen.

I’d pay big bucks to get a piece of writing onto the desk of someone with authority at another organization, even knowing they’d be a little annoyed by it, just so they knew it existed. That happened here for free. The whole cost was one mildly irritated paragraph.

“That Would Just Kill Me”

A camp owner we know raised the honest problem with all of this on a call a couple of weeks ago. She’s rigorous about replying. Same day, every time, no exceptions.

Her worry was what happens if this works. “If I started getting 150 more emails every day, that would just kill me.”

Fair. And also still good news. A full inbox is a logistics problem, and logistics problems get solved with a process. The other version of this is that nobody writes back at all, and there’s no process for that one.

Try This

Before you send anything, decide what you’d count as a bad reply.

I mean actually bad. A lawsuit. A cancellation. Something definitively negative. Write those down.

That list is short. Everything not on the list is a person who read the thing and cared enough to spend four steps telling you about it. Including the one who was annoyed. Including the one who misread two lines and wrote a paragraph about it.

Don’t be controversial for controversy’s sake. But don’t sweat the small stuff that much.

Keep the list where you can see it. The moment you need it is the moment something lands with a tone you don’t love.

Then write your first line reply now, before you need that either. Ours is six words.

“Thank you so much for reading.”

It goes at the top of every response, including the ones where we disagree with everything that came after it.

Now send something that’s easy to write back to.

“5 Things I Love About Camp” is a great post for this, and it works for a reason. A list with five things on it is a list with a sixth thing missing, and somebody out there is going to tell you what it is.

A few others that do the same job:

The dining hall rankings. Your five best camp dinners, in order, with the best one last. Nobody in the history of camp has ever agreed with somebody else’s food ranking.

“What did your kid say in the first five minutes in the car?” Parents are already telling that story to their neighbors. Give them somewhere to put it.

“We’re adding (or cutting) one activity next summer.” Name the three on the short list and ask which one goes. This one does double duty, because the replies are also the research.

There are plenty of others.

Each one hands somebody something to correct or something they already remember. Asking a parent for an opinion makes them do work. Asking what their kid said in the car doesn’t, because that answer is already sitting right there.

Pick one. Send it this week. Then go look at what came back and check it against your list.

You got this,

Jack & Doug

“What we do to train staff and what actually happens at camp, which is what parents want to buy, are very intertwined.”

Jack said that on a call a few weeks back.

We were talking to a team who run sports camps out of a couple of regions, somewhere around 1,500 families last summer, zero paid ads, basically all of it word of mouth and school connections.

They mentioned they were working on getting their training approach written down. Jack’s word for it was a binder. Put the thing in a binder so everyone does it roughly the same way.

Then Jack kept going. “Your coaching philosophy, the way you interact with kids, is actually the differentiator.”

It’s sometimes meant to be this thing that helps train staff and keep things consistent, but really it’s the thing families should hear about the most.

The Binder and the Website Are the Same Material

The binder is an internal project. It gets built in the spring, used in June, and then it sits in a drawer until someone blows the dust off it the next Spring. Nobody outside camp is ever going to read a word of it.

Which, if you think about it, is a strange place to keep the part of your operation a competitor can’t lift. And a strange place to stash the operating manual for exactly how you think about your camp at the highest and most important level.

The Part They Didn’t Pitch as a Strength

One thing came up on that call as an aside. Their key staff is year-round.

“They’re not like seasonal college kids, not that there’s anything wrong with seasonal college kids.”

He said it as an operations detail. It’s also the thing that makes the whole story believable to a parent, because the people who wrote the binder are the same people running it in July, and they’ll be there again next summer.

Camps running all seasonal staff can still write this. The story is about what you teach, not about who happens to be holding the clipboard in week three.

Try This

You already did the work on this one.

Open the training doc. Find one thing in there that isn’t logistics. Skip the bus schedule and the fire drill, go to the part where you tell a counselor how to handle something with a kid.

Write 150 words on why you teach it that way and what it looks like on a Tuesday in week two. Send it to your parent list.

Nothing new gets built here. You’re letting the people who are paying for the output read the part that produces it.

I said something to that team at the end of the call that holds up here. People who think a lot about their thing end up with the easiest story to tell. They’ve been thinking about how they train people for years. The writing is the short half.

You got this,

Jack & Doug

$150,000 to $190,000. A year. To write. Words.

I saw this ad on LinkedIn the other day and two things stood out to me right away (even though I’m not looking for a job)

.The first was the company name: Perplexity, an AI company, not quite in the Anthropic and OpenAI big leagues, but there nonetheless.

And the other was the word “writer.”

An AI company. Hiring a writer.

Thoughts on AI aside for a second, and just ask yourself: If AI is soooo good, why doesn’t the company just have the machine do it? Why pay someone six figures that AI supposedly does for basically free?

The answer is pretty obvious. Somebody still has to decide what’s worth saying. Somebody has to know the audience, pick the story, and write it like a person wrote it.

Because a person will be on the other end reading it.

Ok, so what does Perplexity want a human to do?

Write email copy. Write the FAQs and the support pages. Run the content calendar. Take testimonials and user stories and make them into something people want to read. Develop a unique voice and tone. Take super complicated things and make them make sense to a normal, living, breathing person.

Sound familiar? It should. Because this is what every camp should be doing right now.

The messages and stories a new family gets after they fill out a form and show interest in camp.

The calendar that says clearly what is going out and when.

The camper and parent quotes sitting buried in surveys you took a glance at in August.

The human your camp sounds like when you show up over and over in inboxes.

An AI company is paying up to $190K for somebody to do that job.

And that’s the cheaper one.

Remember the big leagues I mentioned? Anthropic, (Claude, ever heard of it?), is hiring an Executive Communications Writer for up to $345,000.

The gig?

Writing in the voice of the peeps who run the company. People def use Claude to write for them and Claude is like, “Umm, we need someone in the office doing that. And we’ll pay. A lot.”

Claude thinks Claude needs a voice. They aren’t wrong.

Your camp has a voice too. It’s yours, or your director’s, or whoever the family (to be honest, usually the mom) pictures when the email shows up.

And it works in reverse. Businesses (and camps) that aren’t writing are the easiest to straight up ignore.

Facts here. Camps don’t write enough. Jack and I are convinced of that. Sometimes you see a job posting that “proves” it.

Is the internet awash with content? Yes.

Is there still space for great writing? Clearly. There are two job postings on the internet right now that say so.

Why Those Jobs Exist At All

The best AI companies are sitting there going, yo, we need people to write over here.

The top capitalized companies in the world are looking for people who can peck their fingers off the keyboard and make something that makes sense.

Companies pay because writing scales. And great writing moves people towards action.

One good email (or message) reaches 400 families or 4,000 families for relatively the same price. A solid, warm and personal welcome sequence works on a Tuesday in November and again on a Sunday in March. And nobody has to touch it.

Most camps already have the hard part covered. You have the list and you the stories, which I 100% guarantee are better than anything freaking Perplexity has.

What camps usually don’t have is the second half of it. A place for the writing to live and a schedule it goes out on.

So there are really two pieces here, and they’re separate problems.

The writing has to be good. Worth reading on a phone, in a parking lot, by a mom who is half paying attention.

And it has to show up consistently, in a place where families already are, whether or not anybody at camp has time that week.

A camp that only fixes the first one writes four beautiful things a year. A camp that only fixes the second one sends a lot of forgettable mail right on schedule. It pays to have both lanes sorted as much as possible.

What A Camp Can Actually Do About It

You’re not hiring a six-figure writer. Nobody is suggesting that. And you don’t need to.

But let’s cover the checklist here quick:

Pick the human. One name on the message and definitely not “The Camp Office.” Families need a person in their head when the email arrives, and that person needs to write the way they actually talk.

Fix the first two weeks. You own incredibly valuable real estate the second a family gives you any sort of contact info about themselves. Don’t make your response a brochure and then silence. It’s got to have some structure, some space and some stories.

Go through what you already have. Pics from the summer and those surveys from August. The stuff that actually happened over weeks of programming and meals and campfires and all of it. You don’t need every beat. But you have some sitting in front of you.

Put dates on a calendar. Commit to sending messages. Consistently.

Use AI like a drafting partner. Help it outline for you, and then you write or even dictate (voice to text is great for this) what a message looks like.

Try This

Take Perplexity’s list and run your camp against it. Twenty minutes, one pass.

Email copy. FAQs and support pages. Content calendar. Quotes and stories turned into something readable. A voice somebody could describe. Complicated things made simple. Showing up consistently.

Mark each one exists, exists but is stale, or doesn’t exist.

Be honest about stale. If you can’t remember the last time you read the email a new family gets on day three, it’s stale.

Then pick the worst one and put a date on it. Not a plan. A date.

Somebody is getting paid $190,000 to do that whole list. You can do one line of it by Friday.

You Got This,

Doug & Jack

PS - We’re covering so much of this in Write For Camp 3.0

• Writing for the internet, so families actually read what you send

• Planning, writing, and automating your camp’s welcome journey, the one every new family goes through after they raise their hand

• Writing your first sales sequence, the one that takes families from “maybe” to registered

• The consistent, warm reminder game you run the rest of the year, when you’re not asking for anything

4 sessions, 2 hours each. Bring up to 3 people from your camp team. Plus a 1-hour 1:1 call for your camp.

Deadline to join is this Friday.

Join Write For Camp 3.0

All the details are at writeforcamp.com.

And one more thing, which came up on the Write For Camp Q&A on Monday, so I’ll put it in writing here.

Go through the four weeks. Bring your team. Do the 1:1 consult. If you and your crew look at what you’ve built and don’t think it’s going to get you one more kid to camp, tell me and we’ll refund you. No forms, no hoops.

One more camper covers this several times over. That’s the whole bet.

When we bring up YouTube on the TV in our living room, the first thing it does is tile the videos we’ve already watched. Big squares across the screen. Want to keep watching this?

My kids watch YouTube on that TV all the time. For a lot of families now, YouTube basically is the television.

For the past few months I (Doug) have been telling almost every camp I work with that they should want their video sitting in that row.

Which means bending one of our own email rules.

When to Send Parents to YouTube (and When Not To)

The usual email advice, and mine too, is to keep parents inside the email. Every link out is a chance to lose them.

Read more

Every month we recap the K&E family newsletters we sent the month before. A short summary of each, plus why we wrote it. The point is to show the thinking.

September is the first month after camp. The big weekends are over and the buses are long gone, so the writing shifts. Less reporting on what happened, more making the quiet case for what camp actually does, sent while the summer is still fresh enough for a family to feel it.

Five newsletters in September, all from Jack.

Newsletter 1: Bell-to-Bell, Bus-to-Bus

The message: a new wave of school phone bans has a name, bell-to-bell, and camp already ran the long version, bus-to-bus.

New Jersey signed a phone ban into law for every K-12 public school kid. This is in line in with a rule that’s popped up in more states over the last couple of years.

Jack stays neutral on the policy and uses it to name what camp already does: nearly two months phone-free.

The difference isn’t during activities, where any kid drops a phone for a soccer game. It’s the downtime, the dessert line, rest hour, the bus to Belle Island, where a little bored turns into conversation, jokes, and friendships.

Why we wrote it: a national headline let us make the screen-free case without being the ones who brought up phones first.

Newsletter 2: 5 Things I Love About K&E 2.0

The message: a 2.0 list of what makes K&E K&E (or what makes camp, camp), from dining-hall-step mornings to the traditions that thread through generations.

It opens on the assembly area above the Hollow, kids shooting hoops and talking in Adirondack chairs, organized and freewheeling at once.

Then five things: mornings on the dining hall steps saying good morning to every junior camper, alumni who keep coming back (Hut 6 2019 as counselors, Dr. Becca judging Color War), “Friends camp, not stuff camp,”(we’ve used this a lot), the sibling thing (they get along better at camp), and the traditions like Rope Burn and Lip Sync.

Why we wrote it: the recurring “things I love” format is forwardable, and it shows the vibe without a sales pitch.

Newsletter 3: Walking to the Mailbox

The message: a letter a camper sent five weeks ago was still the best thing in her dad’s mailbox, and letter-writing is just normal at camp.

On a call, a dad checks his mailbox and finds the letter, finally arrived.

Inside is ordinary camp stuff, and it’s the only real thing in a pile of junk. Letter-writing is a lost art almost everywhere, except at K&E, where kids pull out paper during rest hour on their own.

Jack heads off the read that two phone-adjacent sends in a row make this an anti-tech push. It’s about noticing what’s disappearing elsewhere.

Why we wrote it: it makes an emotional, specific case for an everyday camp habit, and the warm open earns the read.

Newsletter 4: Mo Money, Mo Meetings

The message: a Harvard study ties in-person “meeting” skill to income, and camp is where kids get a thousand reps at being a great hang.

David Deming’s study linked about 9,000 workers’ meeting time to real payroll. Meetings are 12% of the workweek, the best-paying firms hold the most, and more meeting time meant faster wage growth.

The researchers called meetings “the broccoli of work.” Jack says that undersells the good ones, where the difference is who’s there and how they show up. Camp runs a thousand low-stakes meetings, phones away, kids all the way in.

Why we wrote it: borrowed authority lets us argue camp builds a real, lifelong skill, not just a fun summer.

Newsletter 5: 3 Minutes. 3 Hours. 3 Days.

The message: on the ladder of independence milestones, the 3-week camp rung is the only one you have to go get on purpose.

The ladder runs 3 minutes (a crib), 3 hours (daycare), 3 days (grandma’s), 3 weeks, 3 months (college), on up. Every other step tends to happen on its own.

Nobody mails an invitation to three weeks away, so it’s easy to skip, which leaves a gap between a weekend at grandma’s and a three-month dorm. Camp is the in-between, and the readiness test is simple: did they do the rung before this one?

Why we wrote it: it gives hesitant new families a mental model and a yes-or-no question, right as registration opens.

What September Was About

September is the first month after camp, so the big events are off the table and the writing turns to the quiet stuff camp teaches. Phone-free presence. Conversation. Thoughtfulness. Independence.

Three of the five borrow an outside hook, the New Jersey phone law, the Harvard study, the independence timeline, to say something true about camp without opening with a pitch. Every one closes on a soft register-now nudge tied to the October 1 gear drop.

It’s the re-enrollment month dressed as reflection, written while the summer is still close enough for a family to feel it.

You got this,

Jack & Doug

Monday we wrote about finding 77,000 words on the K&E site that Google had been told to ignore. Worth saying how I ended up in there in the first place.

I was trying to do a deep dive into the website to spec out what an agentic build would look like and how much work it would take, and in doing so found that the content basically wasn’t indexed properly.

The noindex thing was an accident. This is what I was actually in there for.

The website thesis is this. In the next two years, will it be easier to find people to help with the website if it’s built in Elementor, which is what we’re on now, or in an agentic stack?

And it’s mostly on the design side. Claude can help make structural changes in the current WordPress setup, but it can’t help as much with the aesthetic.

We’re Not Rebuilding Tomorrow

We aren’t going to rebuild the website tomorrow or anything. It just got remade recently. It’s more of a long-term question, though the long term tends to look shorter and shorter with each new thing that comes out.

So will we get a new website this year? No.

Read more

Last week, I (Doug) was digging around in the K&E WordPress trying to spec out what an agentic rebuild of the site would actually take, and partway through I sent Jack this:

Just found a crazy thing in KE website wordpress.

this had been toggled off.

So like all of the Summer Matters posts weren’t being indexed.

All 100 blog posts. Somewhere around 77,000 words of writing, and Google had been told in very plain tech speak not to look at any of it, along with no post sitemap and not one canonical tag on the whole lot.

Fixing it was a single toggle in Yoast SEO, which took about as long as it takes to read this paragraph.

We don’t know how it happened, and obviously no one did it on purpose. It got switched at some point, by somebody, for a reason nobody remembers, and then it just sat there, because nobody’s specific job was to go look, and even if it was, this wouldn’t always be something you would know to look for.

What Nobody Looking Actually Produces

Once I was in there, the rest of it came fast.

Read more

Last week, we ran the free webinar “5 Emails Every Camp Should Send This Fall” and about 300 camp pros signed up for it. Every one of those people came because of an email.

We did not put that webinar anywhere but an email. No LinkedIn, no social, no word of mouth (if such a thing exists in the online world). Jack sent one from his account, Travis Allison helped us out with a send to his list, and that was the whole thing.

Email works, point blank.

Camp Is a Really Hard Sale

Overnight sleepaway camp is a difficult thing to sell. We obviously think they’re the best and most earnest and uplifting places around.

And yet, getting a group of parents to trust a bunch of strangers with their most prized possession (their kids) for long periods of time at a high price point is going to take the long haul.

Money + trust + safety + distance. So many hurdles to clear. And they aren’t the only ones.

When you’re selling something with that much friction sitting in front of it, the only way to really win is to completely flood the zone with written content, where you can actually tell your whole story over a long period of time. There might be other ways, but that’s the channel where you stand to have the most reach.

It’s also free airtime. You already have the email addresses. I haven’t met a camp yet with less than about 2,000, most are around two, some are up to ten, and I met one the other day that somehow had 40,000. Parents give their email because they want info and they want to be convinced. Trust us.

The pushback is always some version of “I don’t want to bother anybody.” Announcement time: You’re not bothering anybody!!!

The line you’re pushing up against is way further out than you think it is.

The Five

All of these ran at K&E this year.

1. Five things I love about camp.

Everyone could write this one right now. It’s a list, everyone loves reading lists, you have a great subject line built into it, and you can send it whenever and you kind of don’t need a reason.

Who is going to dislike a list of all the great things about your camp? Nobody.

Jack’s number one was sitting in front of the dining hall saying hi to every kid who walks in. A friends camp, not a stuff camp came from a Kenwood kid named Cole and made the list too.

The subject line and the preview line are indexed 100% on opens. Put “#4 might be my favorite” in the preview. That almost guarantees the open, because now they have to go read number four.

Please, please write this one.

2. The borrowed headline.

You’re responding to something you read out in the world that connects back to camp.

People say they don’t really have a reason to send anything right now. Reading something and responding to it is a reason. The borrowed headline gives you the excuse.

It does not have to be about camps. It’s actually preferably better if it isn’t. Go type in what are the healthiest things you can do in your life, find the article, and say camp does all of them.

Ours was Bell to Bell, Bus to Bus about going screen-free, which also happens to be a topic camps can write about all the time.

3. Sales disguised as a story.

At some point you are going to have to sell camp, and I know people do not like the word sales. I don’t want to be the used car dealer either, the guy who got my information and I just never stop hearing from him.

All you want to do is tell a little story and then ask. We wrote a whole thing about Color War and how amazing the breakout was, and oh, by the way, you should sign up for camp at the end. We did not ask first.

You do have to create scarcity on time. It ends tomorrow. If you say something ends three months from now, it’s not going to drive anybody to action.

4. The parent pump-up.

Parents are the buyers. They have the credit cards and they’re the ones making the decision. Usually we’re arming the one person who’s into it to sell it to the person in the family who isn’t.

At Visiting Day this year the dads were going absolutely ham on the slingshot range and broke all of them. So we wrote something that complimented them on it, because it meant they were enjoying the hell out of camp.

Your surveys are full of this. Read back through what parents said at the end of the summer.

5. The register now email.

We actually just need something from you right now. We would like you to register.

Camps are probably the best at sending this one, because it’s the one they know they have to send. And you earn considerably more trust on it when 48 of your 52 weeks didn’t ask for anything.

Brainstorm every little reason to make a decision right now, and nothing is too small. You pay last year’s rate. You get the year of K&E gear. It’s fully refundable. Then attach a deadline. Do not make it a month out. By Friday, 24 hours to go. Last call.

I’m pretty anti-discount, if you can hear that. The price is going up does different work than here’s a discount.

Try This

Write five things you love about your camp and send it this week.

Two things that matter more than polish. Index on whitespace. I don’t write with that many enters either, but I’m only thinking about somebody picking this up on their phone.

And hit send. We’ve had stuff go out where the link didn’t work or the wording was a little wrong. It’s okay. The real key is being able to hit send on something that’s mostly great.

You got this,

Jack & Doug

Everyone who reads this knows we love Donald Miller from StoryBrand. We’ve written about him before. Great follow, and worth it just to get all of the free stuff he puts out there.

This week he put out a video running through the four rules good marketing should follow.

We’ve talked about some of these before, specifically #4 (Stop calling camp magic or home). But it’s worth mentioning them again and honing in on these 4 things whenever thinking about your own messaging.

Most camp marketing departments are just some combination of the people already running 50 other things at camp, trying to cobble together a plan of action.

Sometimes that can feel overwhelming for sure, which is why it pays to get back to basics on the tenets of good messaging whenever possible.

That’s why Miller’s 4-step reminder is good when thinking about what’s going out this fall: on socials, through email, in registration pushes, and on the website.

Let’s take a look at all four and what they mean for camp.

Rule 1: Zero Cognitive Load

Read more

3 minutes - 3 hours - 3 days - 3 weeks - 3 months - 3 years - 3 decades

That’s how our friend Erec Hillis (hey Erec!), who owns and runs Camp Champions, opened a newsletter this month. It went to families, staff, alumni, and leads all at once.

We talk a lot around here about how daunting it is to sell camp to a new family. This setup might be the best piece of camp sales writing going.

His idea is simple. There are milestones kids, and then adults, hit on the way to independence, and with a little finagling they track right along in groups of 3s.

We’re going to put the full text of Erec’s letter below, and then break down why it works. Because this is a piece you can use over and over, forever, as a way to talk about camp to new families.

Erec’s Letter, In Full

Word for word, here’s what went out.

Hello,

I’m going to oversimplify this a bit, but I’ve been thinking about how kids build independence.

It looks something like this:

3 minutes - 3 hours - 3 days - 3 weeks - 3 months - 3 years - 3 decades

That’s pretty close to what the independence milestones look like throughout life. Let’s break them down:

• Three minutes is the first time you feel comfortable leaving your child out of your sight (maybe in a crib, or a playpen contraption).

• Three hours is the first morning they are in someone else’s care, like a babysitter or at daycare.

• Three days is that first long weekend sleepover with the grandparents or the cousins.

• Three weeks can be a hard gap to fill (we’ll come back to this one).

• Three months is the first semester away at college.

• Three years is the period after college, out in the world with a first job and a first apartment.

• And finally, three decades is settling down, starting a family, and getting into life for the long haul.

The math may be a little fuzzy, but it mostly tracks.

These milestones line up like a ladder that we climb as we build independence.

The Independence Ladder

Looking back over that list, it’s easy to recognize almost every stage. The steps form a natural progression, with one level preparing us for the next.

I have a young nephew who is currently in the “three hour” stage. Half a day away from home, a few times a week, is no problem. Much more than that pushes his comfort zone (and that of his parents).

But they are growing together, and before too long he (and they) will be comfortable with a night away from home, and eventually a long weekend. I suspect the latter will happen when he is about 5 years old.

What happens after that? For some children, the next tangible step ends up being college when they’re 18.

There’s a big gap there.

The first night in a dorm at college can already feel daunting. If it’s also the first real stretch of time away from home, it becomes a huge leap.

That’s what makes the three week rung on the ladder so important.

Camp is among the few experiences that naturally fills that space.

It’s often the first attempt at that shorter-but-longer dose of a new place, new people, new surroundings.

For that reason, we’ve started thinking about camp as some of the best college prep kids can do.

What Parents Hope For

Now, one careful note, because this is easy to say the wrong way. This is not about wanting your child to leave.

I think most parents want to raise children who are able to stand on their own two feet, and who still maintain a connection with home. Who call and visit. Who tell you how it’s going out there in the world because they want to share it with you.

One of the many things that makes parenting hard is two sides of the same worry.

Worry about what will happen when you aren’t there, and worry about your kids being prepared to make it on their own. It’s one of the hardest balancing acts there is.

Camp gives you a preview of exactly that. A camper goes off, proves they can do it, and comes home lit up to tell you all about it.

They can handle it and they are still excited to come home.

The Stories Are the Point

A camper comes home after two or three weeks at camp with a hundred stories. The skit they were in. The friend from three states away. The thing they weren’t 100% sure of and did anyway.

In a few years, it will be the young adult who comes home for winter break saying “I loved this class, I joined this club, I made this friend,” and is genuinely happy to sleep in their own bed in their own bedroom.

The stories are fun to share, but they are also helping to build an identity of confidence, courage, and independence.

Shortly after that, they will be starting those first three years of supporting themselves, and the three decades of career and family follow.

Every parent eventually dreams about that last rung. Three decades. A grown kid with a family of their own, set up for the long haul you got to enjoy as a parent. New adventures, new stories.

We all get there one rung at a time. The play date. The weekend away. The semester. The first apartment. The family.

The three-week rung is an important part of the journey.

— Erec

Why This Works

So why does this one work so well? A few reasons, and they stack.

The timelines are hard, and everyone will probably agree with them.

Who is going to argue with three minutes or three months (outside of nitpicking around the actual timelines, not the concept).

No one is asking a parent to accept a claim about your particular camp or really even camps in general. You’re walking them up a set of stages they have probably already lived through or are watching their kid go through at the moment.

The logic is super easy to follow. Each number three sets up the next number three, so by the time you get to three weeks the gap is obvious, and the reader probably found it themselves instead of being told. Of course, they know this is coming from a camp, so they are probably doing the math themselves, but that’s fine.

It drops camp right into a logical space almost nothing else fills. The stretch between a long weekend at the grandparents’ and a dorm room at eighteen is real, and sleepaway summer camp is one of the only things that is out there in the world for kids to do in this time stretch.

Plus, there’s hard pitch, no REGISTER NOW! link or scarcity around spots are filling. In fact, it slips the scarcity timeline and the “do something now” narrative by putting it on parents to make sure their kids get that 3-week timeline.

It slots camp in next to daycare, sleepovers, and college, things families already understand, and lets camp borrow all of that built-in logic.

This is a sales letter through and through.

Every Camp Can Use A Version Of This

Plus, later on, this email is going to do another job.

It’s going to go into the camp Welcome Journey when parents are interested in camp. Not number 1 or 2, but probably at number 3 (coincidence on that one) when they need the real story about why this is the right decision.

You can’t pitch a great camp in 25 seconds. You can pitch it in 25 minutes of stories and emails, and the welcome sequence is the only place a family actually gives you the 25 minutes over a couple of weeks. .

Try This

I (Doug) would really suggest trying to write a version of this for your own camp. Having talked to Erec about it, he agrees. He said, “I just want more kids to go to camp.”

Champions works well because it has 3-week programs. Not every camp is going to map that cleanly, but you can map it a certain way and get it close.

This kind of messaging becomes close to an anchor if written correctly, because it does so much of the selling just on the concept.

We’re adapting a K&E version right now, reworked for a six-week season. When Jack’s is written, we’ll show you the actual email.

You got this,

Jack & Doug

I (Doug) will be the first to say I don’t have camp on-site comms figured out. I don’t work all summer at a camp. I’m mostly at home or at the beach during the summer so I always want to be careful about sounding like some expert when I’m not the guy walking around with a walkie all of June, July, and August.

It’s genuinely hard, and every camp does it a little differently.

But I’ve seen how a lot of camps run, and there’s one move worth planning now, before next summer starts.

Get your whole team onto Slack or some similar alternative. Even badly. Especially badly, if that’s what it takes to get everyone in there.

Why a Messy Record Beats No Record

K&E didn’t run Slack this summer, though it did in the offseason. We wrote about this over the winter with this post: Why Camp Teams Should Talk in Public.

That held until June, but then in peak camp season things were a mix of WhatsApp and text, and it worked fine. Camps have operated that way forever.

At the beginning of the month, Jack the made the call (with much pleading from me) to (hopefully) change that going forward. Camp summer communication moves to Slack, for one plain reason. We want a record. Every camp needs a town square, one place the whole season actually happens, and most of us don’t have one yet.

What’s harder is going back for it later.

A decision made in a group text in July is tough to find again in September. The funny moment a counselor described, the parent situation a trip leader handled, the reason you moved the cookout, it mostly lives across a hundred separate threads, or nobody’s phone at all.

A camp we work with did run Slack as its main channel all summer, and I just got added to it. Right now I’m going back through a whole summer of real conversation, in one searchable place, pulling out both systems to fix and stories worth telling.

You can’t do that with a summer that never wrote itself down.

Two Payoffs Worth the Hassle

The first is a record you own. Every decision and every “hey, does the kitchen know about the field trip,” sitting in one place you can search in September.

Institutional memory usually hits the road with your seasonal staff. Having it all in one app works to keep at least some of it.

The second is marketing intelligence, and it’s the one I care about most. Again, I’m at home in the AC during those months.

The best content your camp makes all year is happening on the ground, in the conversations between the people running it.

Going back through K&E’s Slack in the off-season, we’ve pulled out material that turned into genuinely useful and even great stuff. The stories were already there in the record, waiting for someone to notice them. We’re working on catching them closer to real time for this coming summer.

You Don’t Need Perfect Adoption

The reason this gets skipped is the assumption that it only works at full buy-in. It doesn’t.

You’ll get pushback, and some of it is fair. It’s hard moving to new systems. It’s hard to feel like you “have to do something.” That’s a reasonable thing to feel, and you’ll still lose some of those notes.

You do not need perfect adoption. A herky-jerky C-plus effort, half the team posting half the time, still leaves you with far more record than a summer of texts that evaporated. The only bar is that some of it exists in one place you can search.

Try This

Pick one function for next summer and give it a single channel. Trips, or medical, or the kitchen. One channel, one clear purpose, and the habit of posting decisions there instead of saying them out loud and forgetting them.

If one channel earns its keep by August, you’ll know whether to run the rest of camp that way the year after.

You got this,

Jack & Doug