Background

Founded in1985 and based in Mt. Berry, Georgia, WinShape Camps is a residential and day camp for nearly 8,000 boys and girls each year. The camp is committed to impacting young people and families through experiences that will enhance their Christian faith, character and relationships.

Challenge

To keep the lines of communication open, WinShape created email accounts for parents to keep in contact with their children while at camp. Chris Lewis, IT Coordinator for WinShape Camps, noted, “We would print, sort and distribute 300-400 emails to campers each day. Despite the exorbitant amount of time and materials used for the email efforts, we still lacked a key offering: photos. Our Website did not have the space and bandwidth to support a sufficient number of photos. Our human and consumable resources were suffering. On the heels of terminating our parent visitation weekends, we needed an easy-to-use Web-based program that enabled both email communication and photos.”

Solution

Already using Active Network’s CampRegister web-based solution for camp management and registrations, Lewis explained that Active’s eCamp Photo and Email Service was the natural choice and presented the most practical option to parents, as viewing the photos is completely free.

The eCamp Photo and Emailing Service allows WinShape Camps to easily upload and categorize downloadable photos to share with parents throughout the year. In addition, eCamp one-way email service automatically bundles and sorts daily emails based on criteria WinShape selected including cabin, group and last name.

After the first couple of years using the eCamp services with success,WinShape offered parents 10 photo and email credits as part of the overall camp tuition fees.

Results

“Our parents are now familiar and comfortable with the eCamp photo and email service and it’s really worked out well for everyone. It provides a great reassurance to parents to know what’s going on at camp. In fact, as a result of the popularity of the photo service and the subsequent growth, we’ve even hired two photographers to spend their days snapping photos of our campers in action. At the end of each day, the photographers upload the photos to a dedicated computer and parents are able to view and download the pictures almost instantly. Plus, an invite feature allows parents to share the photos with friends and family, a great word-of-mouth advertisement for our camp.”

Further enforcing the user-friendly attributes of eCamp, in the last camp season, WinShape Camps experienced more than 778,000 photo views and nearly 28,000 log-ins to the eCamp site.

“In all, we do believe that word-of-mouth referrals are strengthened by the photo and email service. Parents send photos and emails to friends and family, and they’re able to look back at archived photos to remember how much fun the campers had year after year. eCamp has become a great selling point for our camp. The feedback we receive from parents is that the photos are a great window into what’s happening at camp. Being able to look in and see a child smiling, having fun and doing something he or she has never done before, gives parents reassurance that they made the right decision in sending their child to our camp.”

Marketing Benefits of eCamp Photo and Emailing Services:

1. Word-of-Mouth Advertising: families can forward emails and photos to friends and other family members, which virally spreads exposure of our camp and programs.
2. A Competitive Advantage: families want to know what’s going on at camp. Nothing captures that better than photos of joyful campers.
3. Retention: parents who want to remember the camp experience can look at archived photos from last year and get excited all over again. When you build that kind of connection, cutting a camp program out of the budget is often out of the question.