GENERATIONS of
Paul Berliner Chief Operating Officer CampMinder
CONNECTIONS
The Relationships that Fuel Camp
eople. Without people, camp is just land, buildings, and perhaps a waterfront. Campers, staff, parents, alumni, volunteers and donors are the heartbeat of the experience we call camp. The success of every camp depends on its people. For a camp to thrive, it must thoroughly understand the individuals and relationships that make up its community. Do you know everyone who has ever been connected to your camp and how they relate to each other? How many people at your camp have that knowledge? How accessible is that information? Of course, I’m not the only person thinking about these sorts of things. Camps have been trying to find ways to capture and organize such information since the industry’s early days. For camps that have been operating for multiple generations, this task has been — to vastly understate things — difficult. From boxes of notecards and overflowing file cabinets, to numerous databases and spreadsheets (or even Papa Joe’s memory bank), camps have come up with all sorts of methods to record their histories. But that’s the problem. This isn’t just historical data for archival purposes. These are the people who make up the community that is the lifeblood of camp. This is the past, present and future of your business.
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