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Staying Connected With Young Campers
By Pamela H. Sacks, Worcester Telegram & Gazette
As soon as Billie and Robert Adler arrived in Tel Aviv, they headed to an Internet cafe and bought an hour’s worth of online time. Mrs. Adler sat down and wrote an e-mail to the couple’s daughter Sophie, who is at Camp Young Judaea in New Hampshire. All told, Sophie got three e-mails from her parents in as many days.
“It’s incredible because I’m half way across the world, and I can write to my daughter every day,” Mrs. Adler said by cell phone as she and her husband drove through Galilee. “I want her to feel secure while we are away. I don’t want her to feel worried. Her parents are in a part of the world where there is lots of turmoil.”
Technology has come to the escapist world of summer camp, where traditions are held sacred and time tends to stand still. Many parents can now e-mail their children and log on to a password-protected photo gallery to see what their favorite camper is doing.
They can do so through a service called Bunk1.com, which is the brainchild of an entrepreneurial former camper by the name of Ari Ackerman. Mr. Ackerman came up with the idea for a class project at Northwestern University’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management. He liked the concept so much that after graduating in 1999, he hopped into his car and started trying to sell it to camps across the country.
“I loved camp. I was a huge camper,” Mr. Ackerman said from his company’s headquarters in Manhattan. “I did not want to come in and change anything. But this was a way to come in and make it better without disrupting anything at all. I hoped people would sort of like the idea and understand that it really is beneficial.”
It was slow going at first, but the concept proved hard to resist. With Bunk1.com, camp directors find they aren’t pestered by calls from parents inquiring about their children, and the online photos provide a marketing vehicle for the camp itself. “It’s a win-win,” Mr. Ackerman said.
He said that 2,000 camps are now using Bunk1.com. The Adlers, who live in Worcester, are among an estimated 400,000 parents e-mailing their children in the United States, Canada and abroad. The campers reply by snail mail.
A camp can pay for the service or have the parents pay. The cost amounts to buying packets of 10 e-mails for $10 apiece and a one-time $10 fee per season for access to the photo gallery. The site also has a camp store and online newsletters, and it sells CD-ROM yearbooks.
“It was so hard to convince these people,” Mr. Ackerman said of camp owners and directors. “Now, there’s no way they can take it away. The parents wouldn’t allow it. Parents ask, ‘Are you one of these camps that allows us to see pictures?’ The ones that were hesitant are now enthusiastic.”
The Adlers took advantage of Bunk1.com for the first time last summer, the first year that Camp Young Judaea offered the service. “I used it to kind of fill in when I couldn’t write snail mail,” Mrs. Adler said. “That was great because snail mail is slow, and I felt my daughter could feel she was getting more attention from me.”
They also spent a lot of time checking the photo gallery. Sophie seemed to pop up in nearly every picture. “I asked her how she did it. She said, ‘We kept running up to the photographer,’ ” Mrs. Adler said, laughing.
This year, the Adlers will be in Israel for two-thirds of the time Sophie is at camp. Their older daughter, Ali, 16, also is in Israel, with a group from Camp Young Judaea. Ali and Sophie have always been at camp together, Mrs. Adler said, and she knew that this summer’s experience would be a real departure for her younger daughter. She had some concerns, so she asked Sophie how she felt about it. Her daughter acknowledged that it did bother her that her parents and her sister would be so far away.
“I said, ‘We’re going to be OK. I’m going to write every single day, and it will be fine,’ ” Mrs. Adler recalled. “If I didn’t have Bunk1, she wouldn’t hear from me. It wouldn’t be the same for her. She could hear from other relatives, but it wouldn’t be the same.”
On a recent morning, Ken Kornreich, director of Camp Young Judaea, was busy printing out 154 e-mail messages sent to his campers the previous day. Bunk1.com sorts the messages and relays them at 3 a.m. to each of its client camps. The electronic letters are delivered to the campers along with the regular mail. The parents of all 350 boys and girls at CYJ are given passwords for access to the service. Printing out the e-mails takes some time, but it’s worth it, Mr. Kornreich said.
“We are all so busy today that this gives an opportunity, if you don’t have time to write a letter, to punch out a quick message,” he said. “It’s a good working tool if we need to get to parents because of homesickness or other issues.”
Mr. Ackerman, 32, maintains that Bunk1.com does not “interrupt the integrity of the camping experience.” Lucy Novell, director of public information for the American Camping Association’s New England branch, agrees.
“It’s a world of its own; it’s one of the things that’s so wonderful about camp,” Ms. Novell said. “People are living in the moment, and each camp makes a decision about communication and how it will be handled in general. Camps are using Bunk1.com tailored to the atmosphere of the camp.”
Summer camp, it seems, has never been so popular. It is a $19.8 billion industry; and camp enrollment has risen 60 percent in the last five years, according to the ACA. Mr. Ackerman has no doubt ridden the wave of that growth. Bunk1.com revenues increased from $500,000 in 2001 to $1.5 million in 2002 to approximately $3 million in 2003. “It looks like we’re going to double our business again,” Mr. Ackerman said. “I don’t like to predict ahead, but that’s a decent estimate.”
The Adlers can attest to the fact that, even where summer camp is concerned, it’s hard to deny the convenience of the electronic world.
When Ali Adler left for Israel, her mother asked her to send a postcard to her sister first thing. Later, when speaking by phone to her parents in Tel Aviv, before they left to visit her in another part of Israel, Ali said she felt bad that the postcard had slipped her mind.
“I told her, ‘Don’t worry. As soon as we arrive, you can send an e-mail,’ ” Mrs. Adler said.
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