5 Low-Cost Softwares to Boost Camper Enrolment​​​​​​​ - Guest Post

Friendly neighbourhood summer camp administrator

Unless your camp can afford an entire marketing and sales department, boosting camper enrolment can be a significant challenge. There are more camps competing for campers now than ever, making it critical that you have efficient ways to promote your camp and quickly register campers. Luckily, technology has levelled the playing field. Below are five low-cost softwares you can use--each with a nearly zero learning curve--that will help your camp boost enrolment.

JotForm

No one makes creating a camp registration form as easy as JotForm, an online form building platform that’s been around since 2006. JotForm enrolment forms are fully customizable to match your camp’s website and brand precisely, and you don’t need to be an expert designer or developer to make the forms look great.

But the main reason it’s a great choice is utility of the forms. JotForm offers HIPAA compliance, making it possible to securely collect camper’s medical information. It also allows you to simultaneously collect electronic signatures as well as payments directly in your online registration form. A previous post about how to increase summer camp enrolment talked about the benefits of moving your payment system online, and that’s all possible using JotForm.

MailChimp

Whether it’s to announce registration opening, send offseason newsletters, give anxious parents updates on camp activities, or even send a recap at the end of the summer, camps benefit when they communicate using an easy-to-manage email marketing service.

Mailchimp is not only extremely easy to learn, but it also happens to be incredibly affordable. For most camps, the free plan is probably going to meet your needs. But it only jumps to $10 a month after that.

Preparing a professional email with MailChimp is a pretty effortless process, and you can view great reports on who opened and clicked through the emails you send.

Canva

If you’re like most camps, you probably don’t have very large marketing budget. But that doesn’t mean you can’t have beautifully designed flyers, social media banners, postcards for kids to send home, invitations, newsletters, and certificates.

Using Canva, anyone on your staff can drag and drop their way to stunningly-designed marketing material that you can share with parents, campers, and staff. It comes with loads of templates to get started, with pre-determined sizes that make sense for what you’re trying to create. It’s completely free to use a starter plan, and for most camps that’s all you’ll need. And the next plan after that only runs $13/month.

Regpack

With a low-end price starting at $49/month per user, you get loads of features in this camp enrolment software. It primarily acts as registration software, which allows you to register groups of people at a time, offer discounts, and view detailed customized reports.

What really stands out about Regpack is that it offers a first-class way to manage enrollees. You can create workflows, filter for the information you’re looking for among your registrants, and pull statistics to get a better insight into your campers. It’s sophisticated software that will help you get and retain campers, but won’t kill your entire budget.

Weebly

Enrolment will be stymied if your camp doesn’t present a great website. These days, your website is your chance at a first impression. It matters a great deal to campers, and more importantly, parents.

Perhaps more than any other type of organization, camps require a tremendous amount of trust. For many families, it’s the first time a child will be away from their parents for a significant amount of time. And trust especially needs to be conveyed in your website with great photos, a detailed About section, your camp’s philosophy, staff bios, an exhaustive list of activities, and testimonials. Using Weebly makes it seem like you hired a professional web designer, but it’s a small fraction of the cost. And creating a website using Weebly is really simple in their drag-and-drop editor.

Editor's note: This is a guest post from the kind folks at JotForm.