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

We're the camp maintenance guy of newsletters — dependable, helpful, and to the point.

Today's estimated read time: 1 minute 48 seconds

Cory Evans used to open his inbox to hundreds of emails.

He's the COO at South Mountain YMCA, which runs Camp Conrad Weiser and a day camp called Camp Bynden Wood in southeastern Pennsylvania.

Referrals are a big part of South Mountain’s enrollment. But they didn’t used to have much process for it.

Families told their friends, those friends enrolled, the referrers emailed Cory, and Cory wrote it down.

"I had to remember the spreadsheet and keep it updated. That was the pain point."

The program wasn't broken.

The referrals were real, the families were generous, the rewards went out.

It just all depended on one person remembering to do it during the busiest stretch of his year.

That's not quite a referral program.

That's a referral program plus a single point of failure, and the point of failure is a person with three hundred unread emails.

So what changed when they automated it?

Not the number of families referring, honestly.

It's still around 5% of their population — though Cory notes those families "go for it pretty hard."

One of them took a launch offer seriously: bring in ten new families, and your camper comes to camp free. Somebody actually did it.

But the change Cory talks about first is quieter than that.

He had a $40,000 marketing budget.

Print ads, camp directories, billboards.

"It was hard to track results. With Camp Tree, it was the only piece where I could say: I spent X, I got Y."

That number came back 15x.

Not because referrals suddenly started working.

They'd been working for years.

Because for the first time, the work left a record.

The takeaway

Most of a camp marketing budget can't be defended with a number.

Referrals are the exception, because a referral has a name attached to it on both ends.

Whatever you use to keep track — software, a spreadsheet, an index card taped to your monitor — the goal is the same.

Make the referral line the line you can prove.

"Camp Tree gave me the data to advocate for my budget," Cory says. "When I could say it brought a 15x return, that spoke louder than any billboard."

Read the full case study here.

📚 Moneyball by Michael Lewis

The book is about baseball, but nobody reads it for the baseball.

It's about what happens when somebody finally measures the thing everyone else had been eyeballing.

The A's didn't have more money than the Yankees.

They just knew which of their dollars were actually working.

That's a familiar problem for anyone with a modest budget and a billboard.

Until next time,

Peter “Trust the Process” Elbaum