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How often should you update parents during camp and where?

Posted on July 19, 2013
in Social Strategies
by Nick Middleton
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During camp it is absolutely imperative for camps to keep their parents and community updated, but it can certainly become a daunting task when you have to update your internal camp software (campminder, bunk1, etc.), Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and the list goes on. I've posted before about how to best create content during camp, but I wanted to share a few additional tips on how much you should be updating your social entities. 1. Update twice a day, collect content...

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Promoting your camp’s crowd funding efforts

Posted on July 17, 2013
in Social Tools
by Nick Middleton
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A couple of days ago I wrote about how camps can use crowd funding platforms to raise money. Today I am going to go over a couple of ways that camps should promote these crowd funding efforts. 1. Social media platforms: This seems obvious, but you should heavily promote your project on your own social media platforms. Use photos of camp activities and messaging that clearly describes why you are asking for money and allows your community to connect with your cause. 2....

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Resources on social media and summer camps

Posted on July 16, 2013
in Social Tools
by Nick Middleton
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I've been reading a lot lately about social media and about summer camps in an effort to always be up to date on various ideas. I wanted to quickly share some books and blogs I've been reading for your enjoyment. Books: How Children Succeed by Paul Tough: This book was recommended to me by one of my camp partners as a great way to learn more about child development at summer camp. It goes in depth on developing non-cognitive skills. So far a...

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What should summer camps tweet?

Posted on July 12, 2013
in Social Tools
by Nick Middleton
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A few months ago Twitter came out with a great study on the top-performing tweets from the past year. They analyzed over 20,000 promoted tweets to understand what drove the most action among their advertisers. Summer camps can take some cues about what to tweet from their analysis. Here are the four calls to action they found performed the best: #1 Ask for a download: If your camp has a mobile app, this is a great call to action for your tweets....

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Updated – Save time by hiring a social media consultant for your camp

Posted on July 3, 2013
in Social Strategies
by Nick Middleton
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Social media marketing for summer camps is a full-time job! In fact, when I built out the chart below to estimate how many hours per month a camp should spend on social media, I was stunned to see my estimations top out somewhere around 55 hours per month! This is why hiring a consultant to do social media is so important. In general, the services of Social Summer Camp can take the time spent down to around 15 hours per...

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Twitter Advertising for Summer Camps

Posted on June 21, 2013
in Social Tools
by Nick Middleton
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Twitter released its self-serve advertising product to the public in April 2013 in an effort to give more small businesses the opportunity to share their message.   For summer camps Twitter advertising can be a great way to: 1. Make sure your important messages get read - We all know how easy it is to miss a tweet! Camps can promote specific tweets in an effort to make sure that they are reaching their current followers. 2. Target potential parents to drive camp sign-ups...

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How to hire a social media consultant for your summer camp

Posted on June 19, 2013
in Social Strategies
by Nick Middleton
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Hiring a social media consultant for your summer camp can be extremely overwhelming. I get asked all sorts of questions by camps who are unsure of the process and benefits of hiring a consultant. Some common objections I hear are: I already have a marketing associate on staff I have a social media intern who is responsible for this We already use social media We don't want to invest in social media because it does not drive our business results These...

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