Blending Technology with Camp Tradition

Camping Magazine, March, 2000 by Jeff Salzman

Technology can simplify camp operations

"Build a campfire? Huh? Just use the microwave! Like an assembly line in a busy factory, campers layered several graham crackers with chunks of Hershey's chocolate and topped the snacks with big, puffy marshmallows. Beep! Beep! Beep! In seconds, the gooey s'mores were hot and bubbly -- just right for the eatin',"

Lisa Patterson, "Relishing the Dog Days of Summer at Camp," Associated Press Newswires

Has the increasingly technological world really come to this? Has the microwave oven supplanted the campfire as the preferred method for creating the perfect s'more? Consider the benefits that the microwave has to offer: it's fast, it doesn't require sticks or metal hangers, and you can avoid the mosquitoes by cooking indoors. The result is perfect and reproducible -- and awful!

What Is Appropriate Technology?

For most business owners, technology has played an increasingly important role in their businesses. The question hasn't been whether or not to use technological advances, but rather which ones to use and how to use them. For manufacturing companies -- those that compete based on speed and cost -- technology has been used to increase efficiency and lower product costs for consumers. The question of appropriate technology is perhaps more difficult for service organizations such as camp. Where and how does technology fit into a business that is based on providing quality service and a valued client experience?

Blending Technology with Tradition

The microwave may be a great use of technology for the mass production of s'mores, but surely it does not provide the meaningful experience that the outdoor campfire does. Are traditional summer camps in business to manufacture perfect s'mores, or is their purpose to provide the warmth and friendship of the campfire complete with the lesson that s'mores take patience to cook and don't always turn out the way you want them to?

Shape-shifting

The challenge many businesses face is to identify and employ the technology that can best assist in achieving their organizational mission. The first step toward accomplishing this is to call into question all of the basic assumptions about your business in an effort to narrow and refine the core competencies -- in other words to ask the questions: "Who are you?" "What do you provide?" and "Why do you do what you do?" This process has been described as shape-shifting, which allows an organization to constantly re-create itself so that it can better deliver that which customers' value most.

On a broad scale, summer camps provide child care, outdoor education, friendship opportunities, physical skill development, and self-esteem building. However, the purpose and most valued core competency of summer camp, which allows for all of these other objectives to be achieved, can be boiled down into one word -- relationships. Summer day camp may be about swimming and horses and door-to-door transportation, but at the very essence of it all is the notion of interpersonal human relationships. These relationships exist on many different levels: camper to camper, counselor to camper, counselor to counselor, counselor to director, camper parent to camp staff, and the relationship of the camp itself (its reputation) to the general public.

The concept of shape-shifting enables and liberates you to change any or all of the methods that you currently use at camp to accomplish these relationships; you can choose to change your camps' organizational goals, operational structure, or even the program based on new technology, changing trends, or client preferences. However, the core competency that does not change and cannot change is relationships. As camp professionals, your purpose, of course, is to create a program and environment that promote the development of positive interpersonal relationships, but relationships are so much at the core of what you do that they exist always, even if they are not as positive as you would have liked them to be.

Understanding Relationship Marketing

Relationship marketing is a recent marketing trend that involves using new technology to create and maintain long-term customer relationships. In many ways, it is similar to the way business was done in the past. For example, a grocery store owner one hundred years ago knew his customers and their needs. However, with industrialization came mass marketing and a focus on gaining overall market share to the detriment of creating lasting customer relationships. The use of technology inhibited relationships rather than nurturing them. It was good for s'more production and short-term sales but did not create lifelong s'more aficionados.

Successful relationship marketing seeks to utilize appropriate modern technology to create and foster long-term relationships. Marketing is considered not as a separate function but, as marketing expert Peter Drucker argues, "the whole business seen from the customer's point of view." Relationship marketing is not a department within an organization; it is the process of running the whole business.