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 approximate, assuming that your week of camp starts in last full week in July. Some of the deadlines in regards to printing are the same for all weeks and the weekend.

End of March

• After the park has replied to our application and confirmed our dates, send out a save-the-date through newsletter and Social Media. Announce registration once it's ready (coordinate with webmaster and registrar)
• Create a Facebook Event page and inform your staff about it. You and your staff should invite all your friends to camp via Facebook Event page. If you don't have editor's privileges to the Shehaqua Facebook page already, you will need to request it from the Communications Circle or Operations Team, or find someone else who can create the event page for you. Ounce the event page is created, you do not need editor's privileges to invite your friends
• Announce any special education tracks for your week/weekend if you already know about any

April

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

• Figure out who you want to be your key staff, especially if you have certain people you work well with, and personally invite these people to come to camp.
• Create a Facebook Event page, if you haven't done that already. See March for more details.
• Familiarize yourself with all the Shehaqua policies a camp director needs to know (scroll down to the bottom of this document for a list of links). People will ask you questions, and you need to be able to give the right answers.

May 7

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

• Meet with your staff regularly. We recommend a call (phone or video conference) every two weeks.

• Develop the vision for your program.

• Familiarize yourself with our registration system (you might have to request access privileges from the registrar or webmaster first) and start assigning volunteer roles on that document. Note that you can only assign volunteer roles to people that have registered.

• 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 members who are entitled to administrative discounts register by May 24, one week before the early bird deadline (May 31 for Family Camp). If they don't register by that date, they will not receive the full administrative discount. That includes the camp director, of course. Also, make sure to remind the move-in or move-out director helping your week, even if you didn't recruit him yourself.

• Inform registrar by May 24 at the very latest about staff members who are entitled to administrative discounts.

June 1 (after early bird deadline)

• Continue communicating with staff regularly
• If your summer program has 50 or less people signed up by June 1, you will have to dramatically step up your efforts to get more people to sign up. If by the end of June you have lees than 55 people signed up, the Family Camp Circle with consultation of the Council will discuss canceling your program. It is very hard to run a successful program with such a small number of people.
• After assigning a volunteer position to someone who has never done it before, contact that person and make sure they understand their job.
• 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 director, song leader, nurse, presenters, assistant cook, etc.

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

• Consider buying color ribbons for team identification at dodgeball tournament before camp starts. You can ask the general affairs director to take care of this. It's much harder to buy such ribbons near camp.

• The Operations Team should take care of the order for candles for the candle light prayer. But it doesn't hurt to check whether they are on top of this.

July 5th (after regular registration deadline)

• Assign all of the adults and young adults a volunteer assignment.

• Notify participants of their volunteer assignments, especially if you have to assign roles 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 kids 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 (accessible to staff only)

• Make a plan of how you will get the daily schedule and as well as the serving 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 enough copies for your program. Bring the copies 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. Learn more about how to create these schedules here: Creating a Program Schedule, Creating a Kitchen Serving and Cleanup Schedule

July 14–16

• The registrar will only 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.We recommend also printing out a few copies of your Kitchen Serving and Cleanup Schedules that can be posted in the Dining Hall.

One Week Before Camp

• Send an email to all participants with links to the directions to camp (link to the appropriate page on our 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.

Policies that Every Program Director Needs to Read and Understand

• • Pennsylvania State Park Regulations
  • General Shehaqua Program Policies
  • Financial Policies
  • Administrative Discounts
  • Shehaqua Code of Conduct
  • Staff and Volunteer Assignment descriptions
  • Shehaqua Data Privacy