Family Camp Director’s Planning Schedule

Family Camp Director’s Planning Schedule

Hello family camp directors! Here are the key deadlines and to-do items when planning a week or weekend of family camp. This is a general outline and not necessarily complete. We will continue to work on this list.

The dates below are as if your week started on Sunday, July 24th. Some of the deadlines in regards to printing are the same for all weeks and the weekend.

End of March

• Announce registration opening through newsletter and Social Media

• Announce any special education tracks for your week/weekend if you already know about any

April

• Start looking/Have a Head Cook identified (Connect with Family Camp Circle)

• Figure out who you want to be your key staff, especially if you have certain people you work well with.

• Familiarize yourself with our registration system and start assigning volunteer roles on that document.

May 7

• Have an Education Director identified (Connect with the Family Camp Circle if you need help)

• Develop the vision for your program.

• Personally invite people and advertise for your week! Create a Facebook Event page if you haven't already done this by now. Make presentations at local church services if possible.

• Make sure all staff registers before the end of early bird deadline. Otherwise they will not receive the full administrative discount (if their position entitles them to an admin discount).

June 1

• Continue communicating with staff regularly
• After the initial invite to do a job, contact those people again and make sure they understand their jobs.
• Contact every family that you begin to assign volunteer jobs to

June 15

• Have the schedule for the week generally planned out

• Have other key positions filled: General Affairs

• Start doing another advertising push for the June 30th registration deadline

July 5th (after regular registration deadline)

• Assign all of the participants to roles.

• Notify participants of their roles, especially if you have to assign jobs to people that are different from what they volunteered for. Checking with them now whether they are okay with the assignments will save you a lot of potential headache at camp.

• Assign people to education groups (this should be done by the education director). Supervise education director and make sure all group leaders have been informed that they were chosen as group leaders and are okay with it. Not all teens like to be group leaders.

• Send out a letter to participants, informing them about specifics of your camp. (In previous years, the registrar used to send out a letter closer to camp with directions, registration information, a list of what to bring, etc. The Council decided in March 2018 that this should be done by the camp directors from now on to ease the workload of the registrar.)

• Send a list of special dietary needs to the cook. You can get this information from the registration pages on the website, only accessible to staff

• Make a plan of how you will get the schedule and cleaning schedule, and reflection forms printed before camp. (In the past the registrar used to print these documents. The Council decided in March 2018 that this should be done by the camp directors from now on to ease the workload of the registrar.)

• If you or a teacher need any booklets printed for the education groups, coordinate with the education director and arrange the printing.
• If you need the group leader manual printed, coordinate with the education director and arrange the printing.
• If you need any HDK materials printed, coordinate with the education director and arrange the printing.
• Update a reflection form from a previous year or create a new one and print it. Bring it to camp.

July 10

• Finish you daily schedule and cleaning schedule and have someone else with camp experience look it over to check for possible problems.

July 14–16

• The registrar will print the documents that go into the registration booklets, except for the schedule: cabin assignments, volunteer assignments and participants list, etc. Please be aware that any changes you make in the database after this time will not be reflected in the printed materials. You are responsible for printing the schedule and bringing it to camp in time so that it can be inserted into registration folders.

One Week Before Camp

• Send an email to all participants with links to the directions to camp (link to website), arrival time, information about what to do when they arrive at camp (registration), packing list (link to website), etc.

• Add any special programming that you want them to know about, etc.