CODACON25

Everything you wanted to know about the business of summer camping. This session is designed for directors who want to better understand the business side of their organizations. We will touch on several key issues including but not limited to Interest Rates and how they can work for and against you, Regs and Land use, Basic Financial Management, Your P and L , and how to both build and understand your cash flow, and how to manage cash. For purposes of this session some basic accounting skills are a plus along with knowledge of spreadsheets.

This session will help you take a closer look at your camp's operations and provide tools for improvement in many areas. Attendees will be able to:

1. Understand the key components of a comprehensive evaluation of a camp's physical plant, program, and infrastructure.
2. Learn effective strategies and tools for evaluating the safety, functionality, and sustainability of camp facilities.
3. Gain insights into evaluating camp programs for quality, alignment with camp goals, and camper experience.
4. Identify ways to assess and improve the infrastructure that supports camp operations, including staffing, technology, and logistical systems.
5. Develop an action plan for ongoing evaluation and improvement of camp resources.

This generation of staff members are more focused on what experiences can do for them, rather than what they can bring to an experience. With this in mind, what happens when we ask staff members to set goals for themselves based on our camp’s mission and values and their own job descriptions, and evaluate them on their success in achieving these goals, instead of using evaluations to tell them what they are doing “right and wrong”? The result is that staff members are more aware of the impact that their role at camp has on their own growth and development, feel more satisfied with their experience, feel more valued by camp leadership teams, and are more likely to return to camp the following summer.
This session will challenge participants to reimagine what staff evaluations can look like, and how evaluations that are rooted in the individual personal and professional goal setting of each of our staff members will allow both supervisors and staff to see evaluations as an opportunity to celebrate growth and skill development, and offer support where staff are lacking. This session will offer practical strategies for reimagining staff evaluations that will lead to an improved staff experience and help to increase staff retention.

Many of us have some sense that we need to increase our summer staff salaries. But there are so many things that get in our way. (So many!) We’ll spend a bit of time talking about the “why” of increasing summer staff salaries to get our motivation up, but we’ll spend most of the time talking about “how” to do it without upending your entire business, with real world examples to back it up.