This is the Referral Rundown, the newsletter that helps camps grow through word of mouth.

We hit harder than a hot shower after Color War!

Today’s estimated read time: 1 minute 39 seconds

A director told me about a board meeting she's still thinking about.

Someone asked what the referral program actually brought in last year.

She said, "A good number of families."

They asked how many.

She had a folder of kind emails from parents.

She had a real sense that people were talking about camp.

What she didn't have was a number.

The program lost its budget line that spring.

I've watched some version of that meeting happen at a lot of camps.

It's tempting to blame a board for wanting a spreadsheet around something that can be hard to fit on one.

But I think something else is going on.

Most camps undercount a referral so badly that the number they walk in with isn't worth defending.

Here's what usually gets counted.

One new camper, one session, one tuition payment.

Here's what actually happens.

A referred family shows up already trusting you, because someone they trust vouched for you first.

They stay longer than the family who found you through an ad.

The younger sibling ages in two summers later.

And if the summer goes the way it should, that family becomes the one doing the telling.

None of that fits inside "one camper."

So here's the honest way to size it.

Take your first-year tuition.

Multiply it by the number of summers an average camper stays.

Add a fraction of another camper for the sibling who follows.

Then set that next to what you currently spend to enroll a family who found you some other way.

That last number is the one that ends the argument.

Because that's the comparison your board is already making, whether or not anyone says it out loud.

You don't need a perfect model.

You need a number you can say out loud without flinching.

The takeaway

A referral isn't one camper.

It's one camper, times the years they stay, plus the sibling behind them, minus everything you didn't spend to find them.

Work that number out before your next budget conversation.

It's almost always bigger than a folder of nice emails.

The reason most camps can't answer the board's question is that nobody captured where each family came from.

Camp Tree ties every enrollment back to the family who referred it.

So when someone asks what the program brought in, the answer is a number instead of a feeling.

📚 How to Measure Anything by Douglas Hubbard

Hubbard's argument is that the things people call unmeasurable usually aren't.

They're just uncomfortable to estimate.

His point isn't that you need precision.

It's that a rough number beats no number.

Because no number always loses to the thing that has one, which can happen to referral programs during budget season.

Until next time,

Peter “Napkin Math” Elbaum