Get Engaged! (And I don't mean married)
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It’s all about kids today
Quick Note
Got this from a camp owner the other day.
"Guys! These AI prompts are rocking my world. I finally got around to trying the prompt you gave for the training dashboard last week, and now my training plan is basically already done."
That's a Write From Camp (on Substack) reader. Combine it with the The Staff Training Sprint Playbook = done.
All right, on to the show.
“GET ENGAGED!”
That was my dad’s line. Dr. Schott (always Dr. Schott) ran weekend house projects the way some people run operations.
If there was work to do, better believe you were going to be part of it. Me or my brothers would be holding the flashlight while he fixed whatever needed fixing, and at some point the light would drift. Usually because one of us had snuck a book in to read while “helping”. You’d hear it from somewhere inside the wall.
“GET ENGAGED!”
My brothers and I still bring it up.
This week, my parents are at K&E helping us prep the lodges before summer. Pam Schott is scrubbing bathroom fans and painting around doors.
Dr. Schott is in a four-foot crawl space above one of the lodge ceilings, climbing over a 70-year-old kerosene furnace, replacing the motors for those same old bathroom fans.
My job: hold the flashlight, hand him tools.
I’m eight years old again.
Why I didn’t care then
Dr. Schott fully engaged at camp
As a kid, none of it made sense to me. Whatever my dad was fixing was his house, his problem, his thing. I couldn’t connect the chore to anything I actually cared about. Nobody explained why it mattered. The assignment was just: be here, hold this, pay attention, stop reading your book, hold the damn flashlight!
My brothers and I got pretty creative about it. The key was keeping the flashlight pointed in the general vicinity of where dad was working while still technically getting through a chapter. It worked until it didn’t.
Probably, if my dad had been (slightly) better at buy-in, he could have convinced me with ten minutes of conversation. Though that’s likely wishful thinking. The Dad-Kid dynamic has a bunch of other hurdles to clear.
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What’s different now
I know why the fans matters. Campers are going to live in those bathrooms this summer.
My parents drove up, they showed up, and they are doing hard physical work for something that belongs to me. Dad is in that crawl space. Mom is on her knees with a sponge. And no one needs to yell at me about holding the flashlight right.
I’m thanking them so freaking much it’s getting a little (a lot) embarrassing. I’m basically bribing them with appreciation. The work is the same, but for me, the stakes are different.
The buy-in took about thirty years to arrive. But it arrived.
The ten-minute conversation
Nobody on your staff is going to care about camp the way you do. It’s your camp. The mission is yours. The thing that woke you up at 4 AM in March is yours. That goes for owners, execs, program directors, unit leaders, and anyone else with a hand in leading a place that’s so special.
The question is what you do with that gap.
BTW if you are interested in working with me this summer at camp email back - GIVE ME A JOB!?
You can demand engagement. Set the expectation, run the training, hand out the schedule, and hope something lands.
Or you can find the ten-minute buy-in conversation.
Camp can’t win on money. We all know that. So you have to be better at everything else, and that starts with knowing who you’re actually talking to.
Figure out what your counselors actually care about and connect the work to that.
Some came back because they loved camp as a kid and want to give that to someone else.
Some are here for the community, the only people they see this time of year.
Some want to matter to a kid who’s having a hard week.
You thread the needle differently for each one, but the needle is always the same: they need to find their own reason to care.
You can get a counselor to show up. That’s not the same as getting them to care.
The ones who find their own reason are the ones who come back summer after summer. They’re the ones the kids remember. They make your camp what it is, and they didn’t get there because you told you yelled to them to “Care about camp!”
Parents will show up because they love you. Most camp pros don’t have that unfair advantage with their staff. So we need to do the work Dr. Schott skipped.
You already know the alternative.
“GET ENGAGED!”
You got this,
Jack
PS - This week on Write From Camp on Substack, we wrote about Jack's Claude Daily Brief Prompt, the "Boring" things you do at camp, and taking the "We" out of camp copy.
PPS - The Staff Training Sprint Playbook is available right now. Your whole staff training is ready and waiting inside that playbook.
4 Live Sprint Repdlays, The Full Staff Training Recipe Book, prompts to get started, and plan too. It's all in here. Really think this is all you need to run staff training.
Get my newsletter every week.
It’s all about kids today
Jack Schott
Summer Camp Evangelist