In 2023, a parent tried to tell a summer camp that their child wouldn’t be riding the bus home.
The message—polite, brief—was sent via text. Not to the camp office. Not to the transportation director. But to the seasonal bus counselor. A 19-year-old with a cracked iPhone and spotty LTE coverage, who wouldn’t see the message until after the bus had already left.
This parent, like so many others, believed they were doing the right thing. Communicating. Proactively. Responsibly. But the camp never got the message.
And therein lies the problem.
The Communication Mirage
In today’s world, the illusion of communication is everywhere. We send a text, an email, a voice memo, a Slack message, and we believe we’ve done our part. We assume the system will take care of the rest. But what if the system doesn’t exist?
At most summer camps, it doesn’t.
Communication between families and camps resembles a game of broken telephone played across a dozen platforms. Parents might call the office and leave a handwritten note—yes, still handwritten—as if it’s 1963. Others send emails to directors, seasonal staff, or even general info inboxes. Some text a Google Voice number connected to the front office. Others text the director’s personal phone. And a surprising number simply message whoever they remember from orientation day—regardless of whether that person is currently on-duty, off-duty, or even still employed by the camp.
It’s not just inefficient. It’s dangerous.
Because when messages come through that many channels, some are guaranteed to slip through the cracks. And when they do, they don’t just get lost—they become liability, chaos, and sometimes even emergency.
The Real Risk
There’s a deeper issue here. At best, the fragmented communication causes confusion. At worst, it invites privacy violations. Depending on who receives the message, and how it’s stored (or not stored), a single misplaced update about a camper’s medication or schedule could technically constitute a HIPAA breach. Most camps don’t even realize it.
But here’s the irony: This is not a hard problem to solve. In fact, the solution already exists. We just haven’t applied it to camps yet.
The Messaging App We Should Already Be Using
Imagine this.
You’re a parent. You open the camp app—the one you already use to view photos of your child at archery or swimming. At the bottom, there’s a tab that says Messages. You tap it. From there, you can communicate with the camp director, the nurse, your child’s counselor, or the transportation team. You send a message: “Johnny won’t be on the bus today.”
The counselor sees it. So does the office. So does the transportation director. No guesswork. No forwarding. No sticky notes.
This isn’t radical. This is basic communication design. A single platform. A central inbox. A dashboard of visibility for the people who need it.
If a parent tries to message the wrong person, the system can intervene. “We see you’ve messaged the bus counselor. We’re responding on their behalf. In the future, please use the camper pickup form.”
That’s not surveillance. That’s clarity.
The Psychological Benefit
The truth is, families don’t just want to be heard. They want to feel heard. That’s hard to do when a message disappears into the administrative ether.
But in a centralized system, directors can finally see the whole picture. They can notice patterns—like the parent who messages every day at 10:14 a.m., or the one whose concerns escalate mid-season. Not to judge, but to support. Not to dismiss, but to track.
It creates a feedback loop: parents message more responsibly, staff respond more efficiently, directors stay more informed. And most importantly, no message gets lost.
Scaling Sanity
Without a system like this, most camp offices run on adrenaline. Directors are constantly reacting to whatever is loudest or most recent. It’s not sustainable.
But with a platform like this, something different becomes possible. On day one, ten staff members can be logged in, triaging messages. By week three, it drops to three. By week six, the office manager alone may be enough. The system scales up and down like a living, breathing thing.
The camp is no longer drowning in messages. It’s swimming in them—deliberately, confidently.
The Real Opportunity
In the end, this is about more than just tech. It’s about communications control.
Control over chaos. Control over timing. Control over how—and when—communication happens. And more subtly, it’s about reclaiming the camp director’s brain, freeing it from the tyranny of WhatsApp, Gmail, sticky notes, and half-remembered voicemails.
Because the goal of camp is not to master a dozen inboxes. It’s to build community, to spark growth, and to create a place where both campers and parents feel held.
We can’t do that if the messages are missing.
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