Spelling counts - Marketing Matters - marketing of summer camps
Camping Magazine

There is much about the total camp experience that creates an ambience of informality summer, warmth, blue skies, school vacation, recreational dress codes, and experiential learning versus academic learning. Camp professionals often want to extend this air of informality throughout the camp's total interaction with parents and children. Please don't.

There is a potential pitfall here that must be scrupulously avoided. Never confuse natural informality with a license for laxity.

Your marketing program represents you at a point when prospective enrollees and their parents do not yet know much about your camp. They are examining your messages--and often comparing them to the messages of your competitors--for any and every cue to help them form an opinion of you and your practices.

Many of us have fond remembrances of our school years and such scenes as: When we would begin math or science tests that included essay questions, some student would inevitably ask, "Does spelling count?" The questioning student figured that since the test was not about English or social studies, correct spelling should be irrelevant. Some teachers would say yes; others no. It is apparent years later that the permissive teachers were not doing the students any kind of favor. Instead, they were reinforcing an acceptance of carelessness.

Shift to today. Camp marketing materials are too often filled with spelling errors, typos, and grammatical horrors. Why? who really knows? Perhaps there is some feeling that camp is "natural" and "back-to-basics" and that exacting disciplines like proper use of the English language are irrelevant. On the other hand, the people who are creating the messages may simply not be relying on effective backstops to check their copy before it is distributed.