Inspire your guests, staff and donors with a clear, detailed, site master plan that fully realizes your camp’s mission!
Running a Summer Camp or Retreat Center means having a lot of balls in the air all at once. Its a dynamic energy at camp and that’s the fun of it but it can also be the very reason that long term planning gets put to the side.
You know your mission and work to provide an excellent experience for your guests on a daily basis but you also want to have a plan and vision that allows for improvements and growth.
Ideally your camp or retreat center has a solid vision for the future, a plan to follow and the funding to make it happen.
More commonly, after many years of operation, most camps face the following challenges:
• Clutter and declining or insufficient facilities.
• Disorganized facilities layout and poor navigation for visitors.
• Lack of a clear vision.
• Limited development and maintenance budget.
Often camps add facilities over the years like basketball courts, cabins, or ropes courses to keep up with camper expectations but without investing in an overall vision for the camp first. The result is a confusing layout, degraded natural resources and confused guests unable to find their way around camp. Of course this is not what you want but it is often hard to avoid.
If you are a camp owner or administrator, you want it to be different, but you feel your financial demands limit your ability to properly invest in the maintenance of your existing facilities. You may also find that your challenges directly impact your ability to meet your mission!
Kahoots specializes in helping camps and retreat centers like you develop and realize a master plan vision for your site and the facilities that fully support your mission!
Here are four of the common challenges that camps and retreat facilities face and how a master plan can turn those challenges into opportunities:
1. Many issues are directly related to insufficient facilities, which are a result of a lack of a maintenance and development budget. Often there are so many places to spend money that nothing ends up getting done or done very well. A master plan, designed with your mission in mind, becomes an excellent tool to help you prioritize where the time and money that is available to your organization is spent first.
2. Facilities and natural resources are critical elements in creating a high quality camper experience that meet your mission, but they have to be cared for! This is most easily accomplished when you have a plan for long-term facilities improvements and a plan for the care and nurturing of your camp’s natural assets over time.
3. It is far more cost effective to make immediate site improvements with a long term vision in mind! Have a plan, see it through and watch your guests thrive.
4. A master plan is an investment with returns. Not only does a well-planned camp or retreat center create devoted returning guests but you can also leverage your master plan vision for fund-raising with both individual donors and grant programs! Investors, even ones that don’t expect to get repaid, do expect their money to be spent wisely and to result in fruitful returns. A master plan shows how your investments in development will serve your mission and it acts as a map of where and how money will be spent. A great master plan gives you, your staff, and your donors something to believe and invest in!
With a master plan you get to tell the story of where your organization has been, where it is now, and where it is headed. Do this with narratives, site plan drawings, illustrative images, photographs, charts, and diagrams. Grant programs and individual donors are wowed when they see a clear, detailed site master plan that fully realizes your organization’s mission!
Jaime English is the founder of Kahoots. She has worked with GreenWorks, an award-winning firm in Portland, and The Atelier Dreiseitl in Germany.