Being a summer camp manager is no simple feat. You have to balance safety, facilities, staff, future camp investments, and recruitment all at once. Plus, you have to make a full year’s worth of revenue in just a few short weeks.
It’s no wonder that managers are constantly worried about how to get the most from every aspect of their summer camp budget.
Fortunately, we’ve come up with loads of ideas that you can implement to get the most from your summer camp budget and hit a resale value of two to two and a half time the purchase price.
Read on for these amazing summer camp budget hacks.
Use your facilities in the off-season
Many camps are passed down through the generations, so more than other businesses they often own their property outright. Even if they don’t, it’s not uncommon to have a mortgage on it, rather than simply leasing it for the summer.
If you’re in this position of owning outright or you have a mortgage on your camp, try and help your summer camp budget by using the property in the off-season. If you’re close to a big city, see if you can use the facilities as a corporate retreat. Alternately, if you’re more remote, see if you can cash in on the glamping trend, leasing your cabins or investing in specially designed glamping tents through the winter.
Finally, are you close to any winter activities that might attract people looking for bargain accommodation? Ski fields, for example, can pull in huge crowds in winter that will pay a premium for even basic lodging – so long as it’s close to the lifts.
Differentiate what your camp offers
The classic arts and crafts and backpacking are great, but recent reports show that camps are shifting towards specialist offerings, college prep, or more of a life skills approach (e.g. entrepreneurial classes, cooking classes, etc…)
If you’ve got a little extra cash stored away and are looking at how to invest in your camp, offering something like a tech option might be a good way to attract new revenue streams AND let you increase fees to help your summer camp budget.
Offer overnight programs
Are you a day camp who is perhaps looking for how to increase revenue to help your summer camp budget?
You might want to consider expanding into an overnight program. While overnight camps have higher costs (especially food and insurance) they generally report higher profits and healthier summer camp budgets.
Plus, overnight camps that provide an exceptional experience have an exceedingly high camper return rate and referral rate, both of which will help you reduce your marketing spend and further help your summer camp budget.
While it’s a big undertaking, if you can manage the logistics of an overnight camp, the payoff can be fantastic.
Consider outsourcing to ease the cost side of the summer camp budget
Have you looked into outsourcing some of your activities or logistical support in order to cut costs? Some ways you might consider outsourcing include:
- Using a transportation company rather than owning your own buses or vans
- Getting a third party to provide and prepare your camp food
- Outsource labor for specialist activities (e.g. getting a climbing company to come in)
- HR (hiring, background checks, interviews, etc…)
- Tech and IT
- Marketing and advertising
On the face of it, outsourcing might seem like an inherently costly project. After all, as soon as you outsource, you start lining some other company’s pocket, right?
However, this doesn’t take into account comparative advantage or economies of scale. Basically, if you’re a company and you’re only doing ONE THING, you can often do it cheaper than a small operation doing it themselves (even including your margin).
Marketing and advertising your camp, for example, might lead to better returns on investment if you get an expert to do it. Or a major food supplier might be able to get a better deal on ingredients and thus lower your food costs overall.
Increase enrollment by leveraging referrals (especially social media)
Referrals are some of the most powerful forms of communication. And while summer camp managers have generally been extremely good at getting referrals via mail and email, there are other more tech-savvy solutions that might help your summer camp budget.
For example, social media pages are easy to share and easy to get people to share. Without too much work, you can set up a Facebook page (for example) at the start of the summer and keep it up to date with images, activities, and videos for parents to peruse and thus give a glimpse of camp light all summer long. Then at the end, you can simply ask them to share it with their friends.
Plus, now you’ve got a great piece of marketing collateral that other parents can look at, see how amazing your camp is, and come running in droves.
Offer your camp programs to more people
This is one of the easiest ways to increase revenue and help your summer camp budget.
All you have to do is offer your existing camp programs to more people. You’ll expand enrolment and, depending on who you’re offering it to, you’ll possibly be able to actually offer the same program at a higher rate.
Family camp, for example, requires only small program alterations and has one of the highest returns for any type of camp.
If offering something like a ‘family camp week’ is too much of a structural change, there are plenty of other options. You can increase your age bracket to include slightly older and younger kids, if you’re close enough you can offer a day camp options (if you’re an overnight camp), or you can offer ‘summer camp for adults’.
These sorts of solutions are an easy way to keep your costs relatively stable while increasing revenues and thus boosting your summer camp budget.
Wrap up
Keeping your summer camp budget balanced is really a matter of reducing costs and increasing revenue without sacrificing safety or quality of camp for the campers or the staff members. By differentiating your programs, reducing costs via outsourcing, and increasing camp enrollment without increasing marketing and advertising spend by leveraging social media are all good ways to improve your bottom line.
Are you a camp director with a sure-fire way to keep costs down and campers happy? Let us know in the comments or get in touch to tell us directly