When you work at a summer camp, it’s easy to see the value of the experience you offer. Through your programs and sessions, you empower children and adults to develop key life skills, form strong friendships, explore the great outdoors, and make memories that will last a lifetime. However, to facilitate all these benefits, you need enough revenue to fund your camp.
Generating revenue for your summer camp is more than simply hosting family-friendly fundraising events. There are many other strategies for acquiring enough money to power your camp, and this guide will go over a few that you can use in your fundraising plan. Let’s dive right in!
As a note, the advice in this blog post is specifically aimed at nonprofit summer camps. If your camp is not a nonprofit, some of these strategies may not apply. Please consult a legal professional before making fundraising decisions.
1. Donations
The most common way to secure funds for your summer camp is through donations. Before you devise a strategy for soliciting donations, start by identifying your target donors. Two audience segments for summer camps that might make good donors include:
- Parents. Although campers are the ones your organization serves, parents are the ones who fill out registration forms, pay for the experience, and trust your staff with their children’s safety and wellbeing. Because of these factors, they’re invested in the success of your camp, particularly if they’ve enrolled their children multiple times.
- Camp alumni. Individuals who’ve previously attended your camp often look back fondly on their summers. They’ll be more likely to donate to your camp to help you create great experiences for generations of campers to come.
Connect with these audiences and solicit donations from them through various fundraisers, such as:
- Fundraising events. You can always start with tried-and-true fundraising events such as walk-a-thons, bake sales, video game tournaments, and more. If you’re specifically targeting parents and adult alumni, you can also host events tailored to their preferences, such as wine tastings and auctions.
- Online fundraising. To encourage online donations, spruce up your camp website’s donation page, adding calls to action encouraging viewers to donate, and even hosting online fundraising activities. Be sure to follow best practices to connect with supporters and maximize your reach.
- Crowdfunding. For these campaigns, you’ll reach out to a large audience and ask them each to donate a small amount of money. It’ll add up to help you achieve your goals.
Don’t forget to promote your fundraisers to ensure your audience sees them. Take a multichannel marketing approach and send messages through your prospective donors’ preferred channels, including email, text messages, social media, direct mail, and more.
2. Peer-to-Peer Fundraising
Aside from soliciting donations from individual donors, you can also leverage your existing supporter base to fundraise on your behalf. This is known as peer-to-peer fundraising. Usually, it works like this:
- A nonprofit sends out a call for supporters to act as peer-to-peer fundraisers.
- A supporter signs up to fundraise on the nonprofit’s behalf.
- With the help of the nonprofit, the supporter creates a personalized donation page and campaign.
- The supporter sends the link to their donation page to their peers through various marketing channels, such as email and social media.
- The supporter’s network makes donations to their page, which will go directly to the nonprofit.
This technique works particularly well for camps because of their wide community, including campers, parents, and alumni. If they’ve had positive experiences at your camp, they’ll likely be open to helping you fundraise! Plus, when they promote their donation page to their networks, they’ll essentially be helping you market your camp and acquire more enrollments as well.
One of the great thought leaders when it comes to peer-to-peer fundraising is CauseMatch. CauseMatch has written and tested the playbooks that turn communities into fundraising Ambassadors. Camps are perfectly suited for great P2P campaigns because people that love camp…LOVE camp, and that means they’ll be willing to invite their family and friends to donate to personal fundraising goals.
3. Sponsorships
Another way to fundraise for your summer camp is to reach out to businesses to secure sponsorships. Sponsorships occur when businesses give to nonprofits or other organizations in exchange for promoting the business’s products or services. Summer camps, nonprofits, and other organizations often look for sponsorships for events.
If you’re interested in this fundraising strategy, start by reaching out to businesses that:
- Are local to your summer camp. Businesses that operate in your vicinity are incentivized to help their community thrive and grow, making them more likely to sponsor your summer camp.
- Work in a related vertical. For summer camps, this might mean partnering with businesses that sell sports equipment, sneakers, art supplies, or other recreational items. You can also connect with schools and educational programs that support youth development and enrichment.
- Are interested in CSR. re:Charity defines corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a business model through which companies contribute to nonprofits to improve and support their community. Look for businesses with a history of donating to or partnering with nonprofits to maximize your chances of a successful sponsorship solicitation.
This is also a great opportunity to connect with businesses about their existing corporate philanthropy initiatives, such as matching gifts and volunteer grants. Through these initiatives, your summer camp can garner more funds from corporations with little to no effort on your part—you just need to make sure your audience knows about them!
4. Grants
Our last strategy for summer camp fundraising is to apply for grants. You can think of this process as similar to filling out a job application—however, instead of convincing an employer that you’re the right fit for a job, you’re trying to show a grantmaker that your summer camp is most deserving of their funds.
There are many different types of grants available, provided by various organizations. Here are some examples of entities that offer grants to summer camps:
- Federal government. Grants provided by the federal government usually offer much more funding than grants from other entities. The trade-off is that applications for these grants are long and complicated, making them intimidating for camps with no grant application experience.
- Local government. Local government grants are similar to federal grants in that they offer significant funding in exchange for a complex application process. However, since these grants usually only go to local organizations, there will be fewer competing applications.
- Foundations. These entities are usually set up by corporations, wealthy families, large nonprofits, charitable trusts, and more. As a result, the provided funding and eligibility requirements vary from foundation to foundation.
When applying for grants, your first step should be to research which grants your summer camp is eligible for. Many grants have strict requirements, such as a minimum number of summer camp enrollments or a maximum amount of annual revenue. They may also require you to offer specific programs—for example, a grant focused on the arts may stipulate that you must have at least one art-focused program at your summer camp to be eligible.
To make proving your camp’s grant eligibility easier, CIRCUITREE recommends using camp management software. This tool enables you to store and process key information through robust data collection, reporting, and analytics. With these features, you can easily track your number of enrollments, yearly revenue, and more to prove to grantmakers that your camp is eligible to receive their funds.
Regardless of which option you pick (and you can pick multiple!), set your fundraising up for success by properly stewarding donors, sponsors, and grantmakers. With the right techniques, you’ll strengthen your relationships with them and retain their crucial support. In turn, you’ll have an easier time coming up with the funds necessary to create memorable summer camp experiences.
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Rob Burns
Rob Burns is the Senior Director of Business Development at CIRCUITREE and Bunk1, providing camps and conference centers with leading tools and resources. Rob is also the founder of the nonprofit Run2Revive and a regular conference speaker for the American Camp Association.