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

We’re the Alysia Liu of newsletters – laid back yet legendary ✨

Today’s estimated read time: 1 minute 23 seconds

At camp, we have something called a “scanned letter.”

It’s a great example of why innovation can be hard.

Here’s the story:

For years, we wanted campers to write home.

So we created a simple rule:
Your letter home was your meal ticket to the Sunday buffet.

Turn it in, eat delicious leftovers.

It sounded foolproof.

But campers always slipped through.
(We weren’t going to make anyone go hungry.)

And every year, parents would tell us on surveys:

“She never wrote home.”

We wanted to fix that.

So we created something new.

Using CampMinder’s paper forms and barcode tools, we print a page for every camper. They write their letter on it, we scan it, and it shows up in the parent app.

From the parent’s perspective, it’s great.

The letter always arrives (instantly).
No lost envelopes.
No forgotten stamps.

Pretty slick.

But we traded one problem for another.

Now it takes the entire camp to make it happen.

Cabin staff reminding campers.
Section leaders checking progress.
Head Staff following up.
Office staff scanning everything.

What used to be an imperfect system is now a perfectly organized one…

that requires a lot more work.

I see directors wrestle with this kind of tradeoff all the time.

We want to improve something.

But we’re not sure we can sustain it.

Camp teams are small.
Everyone already wears too many hats.

So before we start something new, we ask:

Are we really prepared to own this forever?

Sometimes the answer is no.

And that’s how good ideas quietly die.

Not because they’re bad ideas.

But because they create more work.

That fear creates a false choice.

Either:

Stay the same and keep the workload manageable

or

Improve things and overwhelm your staff

But there’s usually a third option.

I like to think about it through a simple lens:

Automate. Delegate. Eliminate.

The ADE framework.

When something feels overwhelming, ask:

Today, I want to focus on the first one.

Automation.

In simple terms, automation means letting computers do what they’re better at than we are.

Which is basically anything repetitive.

Tracking.
Sending reminders.
Updating records.
Moving information between systems.

Things humans shouldn’t have to think about.

This matters for referral programs too.

A lot of directors hesitate to launch them because they imagine the work:

Tracking referrals.
Figuring out who gets credit.
Managing rewards.

And they’re right to worry.

If those things are manual, referral programs become very hard to run.

But when those pieces are automated, the dynamic changes.

Now you’re not adding work.

You’re replacing it.

There’s no gold medal for doing things the hard way.

The goal isn’t more things to manage.

It’s fewer headaches.

And the best innovations at camp are the ones that make life easier – for parents and for staff.

Good systems don’t add work. They streamline it.

Automating the annoying parts

One of the most common reasons directors hesitate to start a referral program is simple:

It sounds like more work.

Tracking who referred whom.
Figuring out when someone enrolled.
Remembering who gets the reward.

Those are exactly the kinds of things computers are better at than humans.

Good systems don’t make camp staff do more.

They quietly remove the admin so you can focus on the things that actually require people.

That’s the goal we keep coming back to with Camp Tree.

Less tracking, more camp.

Here’s a quick example of how.

Range by David Epstein

A lot of youth development happens the same way learning does in Range.

Not through early specialization, through exploration.

Kids try things.
Quit things.
Come back to things.

They discover what they’re good at by bouncing around first.

Camp is one of the few places where that kind of exploration still happens naturally.

As a camp director (and someone who quit a lot of things as a kid), this one spoke to me:

Until next time,

Peter “Admin Eliminator” Elbaum