December inboxes get crowded fast. Holiday concerts, gift guides, and donation asks from every nonprofit your families have ever supported once. It all piles up, and somewhere in that pile, your camp will show up too.
The good news? October gives you time to get it right. Before you write a single subject line, ask yourself one simple question: when families see your name in December, will it feel like camp, or like one more ask? Let’s make sure it feels like camp.
The instinct to lead with registration
Early bird pricing. Sibling discounts. “Register before the holiday-season!” It’s tempting, and honestly, it’s not wrong that December works. Families are thinking about summer during winter break, budgets are getting planned, and a deadline creates real urgency.
But if the first email your community gets after Labor Day is a registration push, you’ve skipped a step. You’re asking for a decision from people you haven’t reconnected with yet. That’s not how it works with a camp family. It’s how it works with a customer list.
Warmth first, ask second
The camps whose holiday emails actually get opened, read, and forwarded to a cousin aren’t skipping the sales email. They’re just not leading with it.
A few things worth sending before you send the ask:
A photo recap. Not a highlight reel edited for polish, just a warm scroll through the summer: color war face paint, the mail call table piled with care packages, a counselor and their cabin mid-laugh. Nothing to click, nothing to buy. Just “remember this?”
A “we’re thinking of you” note. Short. From the director, in their actual voice. It can be as simple as: the off-season is quiet around here, but we think about this community a lot, and we hope your winter break is a good one.
A staff or alumni shoutout. A counselor who’s headed to college, a CIT who’s coming back as full staff next summer, an alum who’s shared memories from their time at camp. It says the camp family stays a family after the buses leave.
None of these have a call to action. That’s the point.
Why the order matters
Warmth-first outreach does something a registration email can’t do on its own: it reminds a family why they’re a camp family in the first place, before you ask them to act on it.
Think about how this plays out for the family reading it. An email that opens with belonging feels like camp reaching out. An email that opens with pricing feels like camp needing something. Send the second kind first and even families who were planning to register anyway read the whole relationship through that lens.
Send the warmth first, and the registration email that follows a week or two later doesn’t read as a pivot. It reads like the next thing camp naturally does when the school year’s demands. You already told them: we’ve been thinking about you. Asking “want to come back?” right after that is just the honest next sentence.
A simple sequence for the season
You don’t need a full marketing calendar to get this right, and with the holidays still a few weeks off, there’s time to plan the order instead of scrambling for a photo folder on December 20th. Two touches, in the right order, does most of the work:
- Early to mid-December: the warmth touch. Photos, a warm note for the holidays, a shoutout. No CTA, or the softest one possible (“hit reply and tell us your favorite memory from this summer”).
- Late December to early January: the ask. Registration is open, here’s the timeline, here’s what’s new. This is where the deadline and the early bird pricing earn their place, because you’ve already re-earned the attention.
Since registration is likely already open by the time these emails go out, this isn’t about deciding whether to send an enrollment push. It’s about making sure it isn’t the first thing your camp family hears from you this season.
The part that isn’t about email at all
The camps that do this well usually aren’t scrambling in December to remember what photos they have. They’ve been sending small updates all season and through the fall, so the holiday note isn’t the first time the camp family has heard from them since August. Tools like myCAMPapp make that easier because the photo sharing and updates are already part of how the community stays connected, not a special project someone has to build every winter.
But the tool is the easy part. The order is the part that takes intention: say “we’ve been thinking of you” before you say “here’s how to register.” Your camp family will tell the difference.
Want to learn more about CampSite and myCAMPapp? Request a free personalized demo with one of our sales experts!