The Camp Director

Emergency planning has always been a staple in the diet of the summer camp director, youth recreation director, principal, etc.  When parents put their children in our care, it becomes our responsibility to think of all the disasters that can occur so we have multiple plans in place.  The American Camp Association provides workshops and articles on Emergency Response Drills for Camps and they help camp directors with Sample Crisis Communications Talking Points. Learn more about crisis communication from the ACA with this Crisis Communications Overview.

Many camps even hire a consultant to come in a review their emergency plan.  Daniel Gelineau with Camp and School Consulting is a leading provider and highest quality source for all areas of risk management training and preparation for schools, camps, youth service organizations and recreation programs.

All the planning is necessary to ensure camper safety.  The next most important feature is how to reach the families in the event of an emergency.  There is software on the market that can help summer camps and youth programs communicate with parents and staff in an emergency.

MySchoolAlerts - free to school and summer camps

Alerts.com created MySchoolAlerts as a way to make their technology available to schools. with support from American Income Life and i-Safe.org.  While their web site states that it is only for schools, I confirmed that it is also open to summer camps.  They stated that you can have four types of users such as Students, Teachers, Parents and Staff.  They support email, text message (SMS), voice call, Instant Message (IM), fax, home phone number, office phone number, and a desktop alerts application. For group alerts they currently support email, text message (SMS) and voice calls. You can manually add members via a text file, add html to your web site for them to join, or send them a link in email.  Did I mention that it is free.

• The camp is in control of what/when messages are sent
• The user is in control of how/when to receive the message
• Send Emergency messages such as evacuations, closures - emergency messages are delivered to ALL the enabled delivery methods a user selected.
• Regular Staff or Parent reminders - the MySchoolAlerts allows you to select which audience you want to reach.

Blackboard Connect

Blackboard Connect offers a variety of services depending on the size and mission of your organization. Via computer or phone you can quickly inform your constituents at multiple contact points, including cell phones, home phones, business phones, PDAs/pagers, e-mail accounts, TTY/TDD devices for the hearing impaired, and networked digital signage. Results of the transmission to each recipient are delivered back upon call completion. The Connect-ED service can be integrated with most administrative database systems including most custom systems.  This system appears to be oriented to sending voice mails.  It was not clear if they also send SMS/text messages.

WARN Emergency Alert

W.A.R.N. claims to have the most affordable rapid public notification platform available today, allowing even small communities the ability to implement a full hosted and redundant public notification system for just pennies per population or household.  Because they are serving large communities and organizations, this service was more expensive than the others described here.  It is the system used at our U.C. Berkeley Campus.

Parent REACH

ParentREACH gives you the power to deliver messages to thousands in a matter of minutes, through the communication modes of: Fax, E-Mail, Voice, and SMS Text Message. Part of a larger and long standing communications company, Amfax, they have very reasonable pricing plans, and were easy to reach by phone.  Send messages immediately or schedule future delivery. You can reate personalized messages in 8 languages and they have templates for predefined scenarios. You can also access ParentREACH from any web browser or touch-tone phone.

Important Considerations When Choosing an Emergency Messaging Service for Summer Camp

• Reliability of message delivery
• Speed, Capacity, Efficiency
• Will you be notified if and how people were reached?
• How easy it is to use?
• If you do not have access to a computer, how will you get your message out?
• Are the fees fixed or based on the number of messages you send out?
• How do the fees work when you may only use the services in the summer or if you only need the services in the event of an emergency?  Ideally, may never use their service.
• Where are they located? Do they have redundancy? Will their services work if they are hit by a natural disaster or other emergency?
• If your camps change over every week or so, how hard is it to upload or change out data? You don’t want to tell all you Session 1 parents about an evacuation during Session 3.

What services are you using and how did you come to select them?

RSS feeds have become an integral part of my web life.  RSS (Rich Site Summary) is a way to send you web content that regularly changes on the internet. Before RSS,  and many of you may still do this,  you had a set of bookmarks or websites that you went to every day to see if the information had changed.   Some days there was new content other days there wasn’t.  Regardless, you had to keep going back every day to see if the web site had changed.

With RSS,  if your favorite site is RSS enabled,  all you have to do is subscribe to the webpage and the new content will come to you as soon as it’s published.   Often the site has this image on the left and your browser may also indicate a site’s RSS in the bar when the URL (web address) is.  All you need is an RSS reader (like google reader) to be able to receive that content.  You can also get RSS feeds delivered via email with sites like RSSForward. Many news-related sites, weblogs and other online publishers syndicate their content as an RSS Feed to whoever wants it.

For example, this blog can be subscribed to with RSS.

Does your web page have an RSS feed?  For a growning number of people, this is the preferred way to get information.  E-mail lists are great but I would be more inclined to get your RSS feed than your email newsletter.  Why not have both?

Here is a video from the great people at CommonCraft explaining RSS.

This video One Year in 40 Seconds reminds me of how quickly the seasons change. We begin our camp registration December 1st but the real wave of work hits in February when the staff applications roll in. Interviewing and hiring 130 staff while screening campers for the specialized social skills camp is often a juggling act. This time of the year is good for staff training preparation, professional development, document review, and some early staff recruitment. As quickly as the days go by in this video, so will the days of spring and sooner than you know it kids will be turning up for camp. A great reminder as all the Camp Directors work in the quiet of the winter.

One Year in 40 Seconds

Summer vacationers in Australia caught a 5-foot alligator with a volleyball net at a campsite south of Sydney. It appears it was at a scout camp where adults were also staying rather than a traditional residential summer camp. The lead story line on the wire as been “alligator caught at a summer camp” so my ears perked up instantly. While my camp is a day camp, we do have our share of wild life in Berkeley. We have a gaggle of wild turkeys, baby skunks who can’t tell time and appear during the day, snakes, dear, and the occasional mountain lion warning. We did find a baby hawk last summer that we thought was injured. Turned out he didn’t have his flight wings yet. Needless to say, the baby hawk caused quite a stir, not sure we are ready for alligators at summer camp.

More on the incident along with a video can be found here: Vacationers catch US alligator on Australian coast

photo credit: jakesmome