Two Quick Notes (and a Note at the bottom)
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All right, on with the show...
This summer I wore an Apple Watch.
I needed some way to not have my phone out while running around camp with the kids, but could read texts from parents and know how urgent a response needed to be.
Mostly though, I was focused on not having a phone out because nobody else had a phone out. Keeping that up matters to me.
The Moat
When I look around camp, I see all the stuff we have. The lake, the dining hall, the soccer field, the ropes course, you know the standard camp map.
Most places in the world don't have all of those things together in one spot. Lots of camps do. But every one of those things exists out in the wild somewhere.
But we also have a moat. What doesn't exist anywhere is 300 kids all in the same place without a phone in sight. Every day, all the time, for weeks on end.
No other place in the world except camp can make that claim where kids are concerned. And I'm increasingly convinced it's the single biggest moat camps have.
The Stuff We Talk About Instead
I hate to break this to everyone. But kids can make friends anywhere. They can find confidence anywhere. They can get independence anywhere.
And most of what we camp people love to yell from the. dining hall rafters like the traditions, the songs, the lake, even our incredible staff, are all great. But if we're being honest with ourselves, they're not really selling points for NEW parents.
Because there are lots and lots of parents who need honest-to-goodness concrete selling points about why they should plop down thousands of dollars to send their kids away from home with strangers. For a parent doing that math, almost everything on our list has some version closer to home.
The screen-free part doesn't.
It might be easy to forget how important this is because we swim in the moat every day. Of course we don't have phones at camp. Of course camp works this way.
Parents are not swimming in there. Every parent I talk to is trying to figure out how to navigate screens and scrolling in a world that is only becoming more virtual every day for kids. It's something they're struggling with daily.
For parents, we basically can't talk about it enough. I've never met a parent who got sick of hearing about it.
Actually, that's not totally true.
We heard from a couple of K&E parents this summer something like “Enough about the no-phones already.”
You know what those parents had in common? Their kids were already signed up for camp. The only people "tired" of this message are the ones it already worked on and knew it to be true.
Say It Like It's Culture
We made a change at K&E over the winter. Parents ask about phones constantly. On tours, on calls, in emails. "You guys don't have phones, right?" Every single time. I bet most of you get the same question.
So we just put "Screen-free and happy" right on the homepage. Right below the fold.
The wording matters too. "Phones are not allowed" is technically true, but it sounds like a rule we spend all summer enforcing. Nobody at camp is confiscating anything, because the phones just don’t show up to begin with. Everyone just goes screen-free together, so that's what we say.
And it's screen-free on purpose, not phone-free. The younger kids aren't on phones anyway. They're on iPads.
Simply put, camps don't say this enough. So I'm going to keep saying it. Every camp should. Because it’s a true moat, something no other place has.
And hopefully Apple Watches don't count as screens; otherwise, I'm in big trouble.
You got this,
Jack
PS - We're covering this and a lot more at the webinar. This is the last call to sign up for Friday’s talk:
The 5 Emails Your Camp Should Send this Fall.
Friday, 9/18 at 1 PM EST
Sign up for the Webinar
(Replay coming to anyone who signed up and can’t come)
And there’s a follow-up Monday at 3 PM too!
