We’ve been working with Marianne Germain and Camp Livingstone since 2015.
After experiencing how Regpack works for One Hope Canada, they decided to take the plunge and use Regpack to manage their own camp’s registration in addition to their volunteer registration.
With tons of reports, emails and many unique discount settings, Camp Livingstone loves how easy Regpack makes managing campers and payments.
Read on to learn more about how Marianne uses and loves Regpack!
Tell me a little about Camp Livingstone.
We’re a non-profit organization with One Hope Canada. Camp Livingstone has been a camp for sixty-some years, since 1953, and most of our clients come from low-income families or just families in the area.
A lot of our campers are bi-lingual. Some of their families send their children to the camp to learn more English; some parents also send them to camp to learn French. So that always keeps things interesting!
You’ve been with Regpack since 2015. What triggered you to move to Regpack?
We first began using Regpack for our volunteer registration through our partnership with One Hope Canada. That helped us get to know the software a little bit and what the possibilities were.
Then we decided to switch over from our paper camp registration process. Paper registration took a lot of time and wasn’t accessible for everyone. Many people wanted to register online or over the phone. Having software online, allowed us to offer this and to manage payments as well. It’s saved us a lot of time, and postage!
During our first year, we figured out how it all worked and set up the bi-lingual application. After setting everything up the first year, it’s been really good just being able to copy the project over to the next year and fine tune it.
Our parents are loving the ability to register online and do the payments by themselves. It’s really helped out!
I see in your system that you have 16 reports and 25 different email templates. Can you speak a little bit about how those two modules are really helping your work and the work of your team for the camp?
Reports make it really easy for us, especially for the medical aspect of our forms.
In the past we just had a piece of paper with the medical information on it, and we had to go through each one to see the details and any important medical information we needed to know.
With reports we can just ask for whatever information we need online, and that allows us to – if we need to for different reasons – contact the parents in certain instances at camp. It’s just easy to create a new report or update one that already exists.
Since we can copy the emails over every year, we don’t have to restart everything each year. That’s really fun.
The emails are so useful, because there are automatic ones that you can trigger to send automatically to a parent once they’ve filled out their registration, letting them know “we’ve received your stuff.” There are other ones that I use quite often if there is missing information. I have a Missing Information email in English and in French, and I choose that one and then just modify what I need to modify in it and send it. That’s been a time-saver for us. I used to just retype the email each time!
What are you doing now with the time you’re saving that you didn’t have before because you weren’t online?
I’m able to take more time with the parents that have questions, and we’re able to reach more parents elsewhere.
I’m also the graphic designer for the camp, so I’m able to take more time to make the camp images on our website and some things like that, that I just didn’t have time to do beforehand. Now I can work on other parts of my job!
You sound like you have a lot going on!
Yes. We’re a small camp, so everybody has many hats.
Do you find, especially as a non-profit, that the cost of Regpack makes sense for your budget?
Yes. It’s doable. With just the cost of stamps saved and the overall time saved, the cost is okay for us.
If another non-profit camp is just looking at cost, it might be daunting the first year. If they just get over that and try it for a year, they’ll see, that with the time saved, it’s easier and it helps them reach their clients.
Since we’re online now, we’re able to reach people that we weren’t able to reach before because they weren’t able to find it online. Being online helps us do our mission better.
You have several different user statuses set up in your system. How does this help your workflow?
Statuses really help me know where each client is at, and if there’s missing information, which allows me to contact the families in advance to get their applications complete.
User comments are also really useful for me. Those notes allow me to speak to my team, like the director or the nurse. I also use them as reminders for myself. It’s helping me stay organized.
All of the reports and the saved searches, help as well. We have one set up to show all of the campers that are going to come for each week, so that way we know quickly and easily who the campers are for which weeks and if we have to send an email.
We do send out an email before the week comes, to remind the campers what to bring and things like that. We can easily find all of the parents for those campers and send an email to them at once and that saves time.
I know you have a lot of discounts, so I’m wondering if that’s something that you were really looking for in a software or if it’s just a bonus that our system is able to facilitate the discount structure that you need.
We’ve always had discounts, even if we were doing it with paper forms; we’ve always had discounts as a part of our process.
It’s really useful to do it with Regpack, and it’s done automatically.
Can you compare managing payments online versus managing manual payments that were coming in?
It is such a time-saver!
It’s really that because I’m managing a bit of the accounting as well. For me to not have to deposit all of the checks means I’m running after clients a lot less. Payments are a lot easier to keep track of as well.
And again, you can do searches or you can just organize all of that right in the system. That’s the cool thing; you can just organize all of your clients with the balances that they have, the amounts owed, and then you know who still has to pay.
It’s just really easy to do!