When we introduced our new early registration system last fall, we had two goals: 1) ease stress on registration day and 2) register as many kids as possible for camp. Now that early registration is finished, we can confidently say that mission was accomplished! It took a lot of sticky notes, binder clips, and teamwork, but we managed to find a spot for every single early sign up.
90% of campers were placed in their first-choice session, with the remaining campers placed in their 2nd or 3rd choice sessions. Our final total of early sign-ups was 1,786 campers! This number essentially equals our TOTAL number of campers who signed up for those programs all last summer. That’s incredible-God is good!
Some lessons we learned through our first year of doing the process:
- Everyone did such a good job of listing their 2nd and 3rd choices and being willing to be flexible with when their camper came to camp. This was KEY. Without everyone working together on this, this process wouldn’t have worked.
- Large groups of friend request “chains” made things very difficult when sorting campers into sessions. We may be modifying some of our existing friend request policies for next year (or being stricter on what we honor/allow) to help smooth things out for everyone.
- The sorting process took 40-50 man hours to accomplish. Not short, but still not as long as back when we did paper registrations and had to input everyone’s information by hand. That took about a full week of everyone in the office working around the clock to do!
- Our original email we had created to be sent out once we officially registered campers into their final sessions did not get sent out, with a more generic one being sent instead. We sent a follow-up email once we realized, but sorry for the lack of clear instruction on paying your deposit in that first email.
- Lots and lots of feedback on this process being much less stressful for parents. It was on our end, too! We’re already looking forward to next year!
Thanks everyone for being patient with us as we worked through some of the minor hiccups with switching to a new process. And as we come towards the end of February, we’re so happy to share that we now have over 2200 campers signed up for camp!
Believe it or not, we still have room for more campers. Be sure to visit lakeview.camp/fullness to see which camps still have openings! We can’t wait to see how God will move this summer! Thanks, everyone!