Families judge your camp program by opening day and by how the waitlist treats them. This guide covers the rules and setup that make both fair.
Opening day and fairness
Popular weeks can fill in minutes. Families who lose out will ask whether the process was fair, so decide what fair means and publish it before opening day.
Announce the opening date and time weeks ahead, on the website and in every channel you use. Open at a time working parents can make.
Let families create accounts, add children and upload documents before opening day. On the day, registering should be choosing the weeks and paying.
Ask your vendor what happens when hundreds of people arrive at once. A site that slows down or holds spots in abandoned carts produces the complaints you were trying to avoid. A cart hold of a few minutes, shown to the family, keeps spots moving.
Residency and resident rates
If residents pay less or register first, decide what proves residency: an address inside the town's boundary, a utility bill or a tax bill. Check it once per household per year.
Verify residency before opening day. Then the resident rate is applied automatically, and nobody waits on a document check while the week fills.
A resident-only early window, followed by open registration, is a common way to give residents priority. Whatever you choose, show both rates and both dates on the camp page.
Household accounts with several children
Register the household, then the children in it. A parent with three children should enter their address, contacts and payment once.
Each child carries their own date of birth, grade, medical information and authorized pickups. Each registration belongs to one child, so a change to one doesn't touch the others.
Let a household add a second parent or guardian with their own sign-in. Record any custody or pickup restrictions where staff will see them at pickup.
Capacity and age limits
Each session needs a capacity, and the system must stop at it, even when two parents press the button in the same second.
Set age or grade limits per session, and decide which date the age is measured on, such as the first day of camp. Show an ineligible child as ineligible with the reason, before the parent reaches checkout.
If some spots are held back, for example for fee assistance or for inclusion support, make those a separate count with its own rule.
Waitlist rules
Write the waitlist rules in four sentences and publish them on the camp page:
- Order. Families join in the order they join, timestamped, per session.
- The offer. When a spot opens, the next family is offered it by email and text.
- How long it holds. The offer lasts a set time, such as 24 or 48 hours, then passes to the next family.
- After a cancellation. A cancelled spot goes automatically to the next family on the waitlist.
Let families see their place in line. Let them leave the waitlist themselves, so offers don't go to families who already made other plans.
Decide whether an accepted offer needs payment within the hold time. If it does, say so in the offer.
Payment in full or installments
Payment in full at registration is simplest to run. Installments help families with several children or several weeks, and they need more bookkeeping.
If you offer installments, set the schedule up front, show it at checkout and collect the later payments automatically from the card on file with the family's agreement. Decide what happens when a payment fails, and how many days the family has to fix it before the spot is released.
Write down the refund rule for each stage: before a deadline, after it and for a medical withdrawal.
Fee assistance, handled discreetly
Families applying for fee assistance should apply privately, ahead of opening day, and be approved before it.
On the day, an approved family should register like everyone else and see their reduced price at checkout. Nothing on a roster, a receipt sent to a shared address or a counselor's screen should show who received assistance.
Limit who on staff can see assistance applications and the documents behind them, and keep those documents only as long as your retention schedule allows.
Medical forms and agreements
Collect medical information, allergies, medications, emergency contacts and authorized pickups once per child per season, and let parents update them at any time.
Each agreement, such as a liability waiver, a photo release or a behavior policy, should be recorded with who agreed, when and which version of the text they saw.
Health information is sensitive. Limit who can see it to the staff who need it, and ask your vendor where it is stored and who at the vendor can see it.
Rosters for counselors
Counselors need a roster per session and group: names, ages, allergies and medical notes flagged, emergency contacts and who may pick each child up.
It should work on a phone, with a printable version for field trips and days with no signal. Daily check-in and check-out should record who dropped off and who picked up, at what time.
A roster drawn from the registration system stays current. A roster exported to a spreadsheet on Friday is wrong by Monday.
What to send families and when
Plan these messages with the dates they go out:
- Weeks before opening day: the date and time, the rates, the rules and a reminder to set up the household account.
- At registration: a confirmation per child with the sessions, the amount paid and the schedule of any installments.
- From the waitlist: the offer, its deadline and a link to accept.
- Two weeks before camp: missing forms, with a link to finish them.
- The week before: what to bring, drop-off and pickup times and locations and who to call.
- After camp: a receipt for the season, which some families need for tax or employer benefits.
Every screen a family uses to register is covered by the Justice Department's Title II web rule, including screens a vendor runs for you. It sets WCAG 2.1 Level AA as the standard. Read the rule summary on ADA.gov.
Where LFW fits
The LFW Platform runs household registration with resident rates, waivers, payment plans, places that never oversell and a waitlist kept in order. Send a written setup request, and we reply within one business day.
Leland Fiegel