Jack's Camp Friends Newsletter |
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Hey, it’s Jack. Turns out buying a summer camp makes you busy. Real busy. Who knew?!
So this week Doug’s jumping in with a guest post, which tracks, since he just spent a few days hanging around camp with me.
He’s got some thoughts. Doug, take it away.
It was rest hour, and four kids were playing a game called Smash Ball.
The Smash Ball setup was a ping pong table wedged into the space between two cabins.
Two kids stood at either end holding tennis rackets. They slowly hit a tennis ball back and forth over the net, gently, while a couple of other kids sit and watch.
There’s no smashing involved. It’s the opposite of smashing.
It’s about as mellow as a game gets. And they played it for a looooong time. Talking. Chasing the ball down. Talking more. Coming up with a new rule or two. Talking more.
I was up at Jack’s camp for this one. It came in the middle of a stretch after dropping my own kid off at her camp and then visiting a few other camps, Jack’s included.
So we sat there watching these kids for a while, catching up about stuff I honestly can’t remember, because mostly we were just watching the game.
It was very, very regular.
What camps are actually selling
Give a parent 5,000 guesses for what they actually want out of camp for their kids, and I don’t think these exact moments would come up.
Not an hour spent hitting a tennis ball over a ping pong table. Not a rest hour that turns into a whole lot of pleasant nothing. Not 20 minutes of skipping rocks because the lake happened to be right there.
Nobody lists that stuff. Ever.
But I think most parents would love every bit of it. Want every bit of it. And honestly, they should. Because of what it, and thousands of other moments like it, stand for.
Time and connection.
Which happens to be the thing camps are actually selling. And also, weirdly, the thing they can almost never manage to say out loud.
Camps struggle to describe this. And it really isn’t anyone’s fault, because it’s a tricky spot to stand in.
You’ve got this amazing program. One you’ve put (maybe some blood), actual sweat, and probably more-than-a-few tears into. That stuff lands on the front page of websites, in the promo videos, and all over the social media feed. It should.
And then also there’s this quieter, more regular thing happening at the same time, and you’re trying to convey this more as a feeling than a deliverable.
Card games. Sitting on hills. The slow stroll to meals. Swimming in lazy circles.
That regularness is the hardest part to capture. It might also be the most valuable part you have. Because a lot of the rest of the world lacks it.
The answer isn’t to go and market yourself as “slow” or “regular” or whatever the word would be. It’s to be intentional about catching those moments when they actually happen. And defining them for what they are.
Write it down?
Mostly, yeah. Write more of it down. Get more of it on the (virtual) page while you can, especially right now in the middle of the summer, when the examples are everywhere and the whole thing is running at its most emotional.
Jack did exactly this a few days ago, writing to camp's parents about a very ordinary Monday morning.
Kids up before the bell, kids shuffling to breakfast, one kid eyeing his poorly packed backpack and deciding "that's a future me problem." (It's here, and it's good.)
And if you want the longer case for writing more about your camp, we laid the whole thing out here.
Being intentional about spelling it out is very much worth it.
Anyway. Smash Ball.
A game called Smash Ball, where the name is the loud part and the game itself is the quiet, better part.
The best stuff at camp is the obvious stuff. But also the best stuff at camp is the not-obvious-at-first stuff. It turns out camp just has lots of great stuff.
And the quiet part never sounds like much of anything, right up until you’re standing there in the gap between two cabins, watching a couple of kids tap a tennis ball back and forth for no reason at all.
It won’t look like much of anything. It never does. But it means a lot. And it will to parents too, if you find ways to tell them.
(Stealing from Jack)
You Got This,
Doug
PS - Thoughts on this? An email to doug@thesummercampsociety.com will do the trick.
More PS - We are writing about camp marketing, sales, and strategies 3x a week on Write From Camp on Substack. Check it out.
