Summer holidays are the time of the year when parents allow their children to do almost anything they want as long as they do not hurt themselves. Some families go on cross country or foreign trips but most families prefer staying at home.
The most common choice for parents is to send their child to a summer camp. Summer camps can be a great place for children to grow mentally and physically. These days summer camps are providing a variety of activities that can be beneficial for school-going children.
However, summer camp organizers are not able to attract children and their parents because their summer camps are not providing anything unique. The organizers need to bring their camps to a standard that provides quality, safety, and productivity to children.
Here are 5 steps an organizer can follow to attract more children:
Marketing Your Camp
Yes! This is the most basic step of having more children coming to your summer camp. You can start by marketing for schools in your locality. You can distribute flyers, do email advertising and run a social media campaign.
If you happen to have a website for your summer camp then you can do SEO on its webpage so if someone searches for summer camp your site ranks at the top.
Offering Productive Activities
This is the part where most summer camps are offering the same old activities that were offered half a century ago. Times have changed and parents want their children to learn productive things at the summer camp while having fun.
You can carry out online surveys to see what parents want their children to do at the summer camp. This way you can plan ahead and offer activities that will turn out to be popular among the school-going children.
Offering A Value-Oriented Program
A summer camp is a place that a child visits alone and experiences/interacts with strangers for the first time. It is important for you as an organizer to make the children at your summer camp learn teamwork, kindness, gratitude, respect for others, and cooperation so they return as wiser individuals.
Safety And Security
To make a reputation among parents, you need to ensure the well-being of the children at your summer camp. You must have camp supervisors who are well trained and experienced. It is also important to do background checks of staff that will be present on-site.
The overall safety and security should be ensured by hiring a security manager that can deal with an emergency.
Plan Ahead
While preparing for the upcoming summer season make sure that you have a plan of action to follow. You can research to target the right audience and plan the activities that need to be carried out at the summer camp.
Make sure that the meals offered at your summer camp are sourced from a reliable contractor that provides hygienic food and delivers on time. Give an overhaul to your campsite if it is outdated and get everything to work properly.
Last but not the least, keep interacting with the parents and children once the camp is over. Get feedback from them about what changes they would want and what was something they liked the most. This way your summer camp will become popular and attract more campers.