Nowadays, having a streamlined and automated camp registration process is a must.
Parents don’t want the hassle of filling out endless paper registration forms, mailing them to you, and then struggling with the payment process.
Camp registration software mitigates those issues, but its benefits go well beyond that.
In this post, we’ll explore how the software can help camp directors improve their own registration process, list some problems that camp registration software helps solve, and explain how it does that.
- Your Registration Process Is Too Complicated
- Lacking Enough Payment Options for Parents
- Transitioning From Registration to Enrollment
- Communicating With Parents Takes Too Long
- Difficulties Collecting and Analyzing Useful Data
- Conclusion
Your Registration Process Is Too Complicated
In some ways, the registration process is what makes or breaks your camp’s success. It’s that crucial step between parents thinking about enrollment and the actual enrollment.
Therefore, parents’ registration experience can make all the difference when it comes to boosting enrollment rates.
If your registration forms are too long or too complicated, it’s definitely time to change that because, according to The Manifest, length is one of the key reasons for form abandonment.
Source: The Manifest
The parents don’t really want to waste time on forms that are too complex or take too long to fill out, and they’ll have no problem looking elsewhere if the process on your website is too tedious.
Source: The Manifest
In other words, a time-consuming and complicated online camp registration experience leads to frustration and frustration leads to form abandonment.
Once the form is abandoned, parents are not very likely to return.
Besides form abandonment, another telltale sign of a complicated camp registration process is if your camp is receiving forms that are filled out incorrectly or not completely.
Luckily, the problem of an overly complex registration process is easily solved by camp registration software.
For instance, our own solution—Regpack—allows you to build and customize your own registration forms and embed them on your website.
With the registration form builder, creating your own custom registration form is super easy. Just drag and drop the elements that are relevant to your camp!
Another big part of Regpack’s registration solution is conditional logic. This is what makes the whole registration experience smoother and more personalized.
Conditional logic makes the applicant feel like you’re right there, guiding them throughout the whole registration process because it modifies the form in accordance with the applicant’s needs.
For example, if a parent clicks “Yes” underneath the statement “My Child Has Food Allergies”, conditional logic triggers questions about these allergies.
Source: Regpack
And if their answer is “No”, those food allergy questions are never shown, letting the parents move on with their registration seamlessly.
To sum everything up, long, complicated registration forms will drive away the parents. And let’s not even get into paper forms that need to be printed out and then mailed in!
All of that is simply too much work.
Why not consider embracing new trends and look into getting camp registration software? It would certainly be a huge upgrade for the parents’ registration experience!
Lacking Enough Payment Options for Parents
Parents want a registration process that is quick and easy, but they also want flexibility. Especially when it comes to payment options.
According to the Baymard Institute, the lack of customers’ preferred payment processing options is another great cause of cart abandonment.
Source: Baymard Institute
Although their data mainly pertains to e-commerce, the same can be applied to the camp industry.
If parents don’t see their preferred payment method on your registration page, they will probably go look elsewhere.
This is not only because not being able to pay with their preferred option is a hassle, but for some, having a personalized payment plan and being able to pay in installments is the only way to afford your camp.
Therefore, providing parents with options would surely increase your camp registrations.
Online camp registration software like Regpack provides you with that flexibility parents need when it comes to payment options, and, since the software is fully automated and integrated into your website, it makes the camp registration experience a breeze.
Regpack allows you to fully control how and when the payment will be made.
Don’t forget, the more options you offer, the more likely the parents will be to complete that registration process, and pay on time.
Take a look at some of the most preferred payment methods worldwide:
Having at least some of these options enabled will definitely go a long way when it comes to parents’ satisfaction.
Seeing their favorite payment option will also make them more inclined to complete the registration.
Moreover, providing a personalized plan and giving the opportunity to pay in installments will make all the difference to some parents and it will be greatly appreciated.
Source: Regpack
Everyone’s financial situation is different, and for some, that’s the only way to provide their children with this valuable experience.
To conclude, it’s so easy to abandon the registration process nowadays—all it takes is just one click—and making online payments a hassle can negatively impact your registration rates.
Camp registration software mitigates that issue by automating the whole process and providing an opportunity to tailor the payment process to every parent’s needs.
In other words, providing a plethora of payment options is beneficial for both you and the parents.
Transitioning From Registration to Enrollment
The transition from registration to enrollment can be quite challenging, time-consuming, and resource-intensive. Particularly if it’s done manually.
There are a lot of tasks that camp enrollment teams need to handle. They must collecti important camper information along with forms, medical records, and waivers from parents and guardians, track payments, schedule activities, and manage cancellations and waitlists, to name just a few.
Juggling all of that can be quite daunting. Doing it manually, however, is a complete nightmare.
Consider, for example, the documentation alone. There are so many documents to manage, send, track, and receive.
Firstly, you need to send out invoices, general information about your camp, medical forms, etc. and then you also have to make sure all of these are filled out and collected for each camper before you confirm enrollment.
Below are listed some examples of forms and waivers needed for camp enrollment:
Source: The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation
Needless to say, this is a lot of work—for your camp staff members and the parents alike.
However, camp registration software makes the transition from registration to enrollment much easier by automating the whole process, regardless of how you usually do it.
For instance, if you opt for open enrollment, the software will automatically enroll our camper once all the paperwork is submitted.
On the other hand, closed enrollments are also possible.
You might want to do camper interviews between the registration and enrollment, and camp registration software allows you to confirm the camper’s enrollment when it suits you.
All in all, camp enrollment should be a seamless process from start to finish. Having every step of day-to-day operations automated could be a huge game changer for your camp.
Communicating With Parents Takes Too Long
Communication with parents is one of the keys to a camp’s success, no doubt about it, and it never stops—it takes place before, during, and after camp.
Most commonly, the communication between a camp and the parents transpires via email since it’s more personal and it provides parents with flexibility as it allows them to save emails to read or to act on them later.
Having such personalized, information-packed, and camper-specific means of communication presents a great benefit to the parents. It also presents a lot of time-consuming work for you.
Naturally, decreasing the quality of communication is not an option, so camp registration software is a perfect solution when it comes to time-effective communication because it streamlines the process without impacting the personal touch of emails.
And it can do so in two ways.
To begin with, the communication tools allows you to create personalized emails, parts of which can be automatically filled in by pulling the information from the registration form.
In other words, you’d need to write only one email for a specific situation and then let the software auto-populate campers’ information into the email.
This way, the personal touch is preserved without having to write basically the same email to every single parent. And then you can just filter the parents that the email needs to be sent to.
Plus, emails can be edited according to your needs later on.
Another way in which camp management software streamlines your communication is by sending out your emails automatically after certain actions—so-called triggers—take place.
For example, triggers such as registration completion, successful payment, or missed payment, can be set to activate emails that contain registration or payment confirmation, as well as a payment reminder.
Here’s what else it can help with:
Source: Regpack
Simply put, this feature allows you to set up conditions that need to be met in order for certain emails to be sent, and by doing so, saves you so much precious time.
Relying on technology to improve communication might seem counterintuitive.
However, with automation, it’s not the personal touch you’re losing, but the time-consuming, tedious aspects of writing a ton of emails—a task that can be carried out so much quicker with camp registration software.
Difficulties Collecting and Analyzing Useful Data
It’s only natural you’re always looking for new ways to improve your camp. Whether you’re running a day camp, summer camp, or overnight camp, you need the proper data to analyze it’s success.
A great way to do that is by collecting and analyzing various data pertaining to your campers and their camping experience, and by doing so, evaluating your camp’s performance and boost revenue.
For example, you can track if that new early bird incentive has affected your enrollment rates, how often your campers return to your camp for another year, or if this year’s enrollment rates were higher or lower than the last year’s
All this data can be useful, but in order for it to be usable, it needs to be collected and analyzed in the right way.
In other words, if your data is scattered across paper or digital forms and different software solution, with no centralized database, keeping track of all crucial information becomes quite difficult.
Camp registration software proves quite effective for this kind of problem. It’s able to collect, analyze, centralize, and make sense of all the relevant data from hundreds and hundreds of campers.
Plus, it makes the data available via reports and charts to everyone on the team in real time.
Here are some of the reporting features to look for in your camp registration software:
Source: Regpack
Essentially all you need to know about any aspect of your camp, from enrollment rates to its financial performance, can be easily tracked with these features.
Not only that, but camp registration software will provide you with detailed statistics and help you better visualize the information with custom graphs and charts.
Source: Regpack
All in all, there is a lot of useful data that can have a significant role in your camp’s improvement.
So much of it, in fact, that keeping track of it all via paper forms or Excel sheets is extremely time-consuming, tedious, and, after all, unnecessary because camp registration software makes data tracking and analytics so much more streamlined, centralized, and compact.
Conclusion
Camp administration is not easy.
There is so many administrative tasks involved in it, from designing the camp program, staff management, to making sure you adhere to all the safety and health protocols, and still, if your online registration process is not seamless, it’s debatable whether all those efforts will pay off in the end.
Fortunately, camp software can significantly streamline the registration experience. With the software, parents can easily register and pay without ever leaving your website.
Not only that but it also helps you with more effective transitions from registration to enrollment, communication with parents, and data collection and analysis.
In short, camp registration software makes the registration experience a breeze, leading to a successful camp experience.