How I stopped blaming kids for not liking camp, and how that changed everything. Roger Sterling: I bet there were people in the Bible walking around, complaining about “kids today.” Don Draper: Kids today? They have no one to look up to. ‘Cause they’re looking up to us. This moment in the TV series “Mad Men” hit me like a ton of bricks the first time I witnessed it. Earlier in that very same day, I had returned home from doing some after-school tutoring in an urban church, and I had been lamenting how unfocused the kids seemed to be on their homework. They wanted to look at Pokémon cards, or talk to each other, or do ANYTHING besides the homework they were there to do. When describing the situation to my wife, I’m pretty sure I literally said, “In MY day…” And then I saw this episode, and I winced. It made me think – what if the problem hasn’t always been with kids, but instead with the society we’d structured for them? What if the problem wasn’t the kids I was mentoring, and the problem was with me? Flash forward a few years, and I’ve gained some considerable context to this issue. I’ve learned that this sort...
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Deciding what print ads (if any) are right for you I have to be honest with you: sometimes, print marketing vexes me. Let me explain. With all of the “modern” ways of marketing, like creating an awesome website, or powerful and targeted online ads (more on that coming soon), print marketing feels a little… scary. The reasons for this are two fold. 1) It’s very hard to know if someone found you via a print advertisement, whereas our websites will tell us exactly where people have come to us from. 2) Print ads are, per capita, simply more expensive. Now, you might be ready to hit your “back” button and go read about some other opportunities. But it isn’t so simple. While it’s true that our marketing dollars are scarce, and their are a LOT of low hanging fruit opportunities out there, it doesn’t have to be a question of “should we take advantage of these marketing opportunities while ignoring these others?” That’s what I like to call “narrow framing, or a decision making approach that thinks of things in terms of “do I do this, or do I do that?” while ignoring the fact that for every single dollar you have, there are infinite possibilities. You don’t need...
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Getting your Campers and their Families to do (some of) Your Marketing for You If you are in a position to make summer camp marketing decisions, you’ve heard the term “word of mouth marketing” more times than you can remember. If you were playing camp marketing bingo, “word of mouth marketing” would be the center square. The big mistake I made when I took on the responsibility of making marketing decisions for a summer camp? I assumed this whole “word of mouth” thing would take care of itself. And it does, to some degree… but relying on it taking care of itself was causing us to miss out on a ton of word of mouth good will. I’ll explain where I was, and what I discovered. By the way – if you want to take a break and check out Travis Allison’s definitive slide-show on word of mouth marketing from his 2014 Tristate ACA conference, I couldn’t blame you. I learned a ton there, and much of what he covers is NOT covered below. The first step in developing a word of mouth “buzz” The big idea I had at the time was to create singular, memorable events at camp. Big events, with lots of pomp and circumstance. My...
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