It is time to get your literature out for your summer camps! If you don't have your stuff out there now, parents will fill their kid's time with other camps. Get on it if you haven't already. Summer camps are very lucrative part of your offerings. Consider what the parents want: safe fun for their kids, part to all day experience and care. These two can be combined for a cost. With careful planning you can have both.
To start you need to decide on what you can do. Do you have the staff to run a good camp. Can you get background checks on these people to assure the parents that they can be with kids? Can they lead kids through the daily routine in a way that is fun, supportive, constructive, and ensures repeat camp visitors? What times do you have, can you realistically do double sessions? Do you need to take up the whole park or can you rope off sections so others can skate too? Don't crowd your camps, but also be aware of people wanting to come to your park.
Secondly can you schedule any fun activities into the day. How long do you have? Can you offer a special day with a famous skater or a demo? Contact local pros and see if you can't get them to do a day or two - and charge accordingly. This is value added and can command a higher price. Can you take a dip in a pool, the lake, play basketball, end with ice cream? Simple things help like a popsicle break at 10.
Thirdly take advantage of your resources. If you have a van, the staff, and local stuff schedule a full day! Do a tour of different places. Remember that if your are teaching, you price it one way than if you are touring. A tour is less costly, supervision, than instruction. Tours can have a higher camper to staff ratio and less needs for the person in charge to entertain the troops. But what is to say you can't instruct at other places? A "learn to skate the bowl" at a different park can attract enough people to make it worth your while. Similarly if you can work with the parks department, you can use your camp expertise to make money for your park and your people by offering camp services and organization to their parks. This helps you generate good feelings with parents in the region and helps solidify your working relationship with other parks. So if you have the team, staff, and organization, branch out! Don't forget to arm your staff with special prizes like your t-shirts, stickers, decks and other stuff. (Remember that this is advertising and should be counted as such for tax purposes.)
Work with your suppliers to offer add-ons such as helmet and pad specials, t-shirts supported by the outside company, camp sponsors! If you have a good relationship with a product rep or a local entity why not have them sponsor a camp, provide a demo, print shirts for the camp with their info on it (cross promotion). As an example, Company G has its factory in your town, so you get them to sponsor one of your camps, provide a pro demo, special prices on gear, help promote.
Finally get some feedback from the parents. Did you have a weak summer last year? Why? Call a few parents to find out. Then improve. In the end add camps to your summer plans and get the word out now. Ads, flyers, and promotions are needed to fill these. Send your skate team out to pass out flyers, take an add out in a parenting mag, provide flyers at area skate shops. You are providing care, education, and entertainment. By providing for the whole experience you will make the most of your summer camps!
