Every summer we ask our campers and their parents for feedback on their Mini-Yo-We experience. If we’re honest, most of the feedback is over-the-top positive. (Which we love to hear!) However, we do listen closely for subtle trends in the feedback to help us better serve families attending Camp. Below are a few examples of the sort of feedback we’ve received and some of the changes we’ve made because of it!
Feedback: My son loves Camp but he’s a bit of an introvert. Sometimes it seems like things are just a little too high energy!
The truth is the average young leader that chooses to serve at Mini-Yo-We is pretty outgoing. That might seem like an obvious statement, but many of our staff are energetic and love to draw people around them into the action.. While most of the time this quality is a great strength of our team, it can sometimes make it hard for them to incorporate a more introverted camper into the busyness and excitement of program. This summer we are making a concentrated effort to train our staff to engage every camper that chooses to come to Mini-Yo-We. In fact, during our Mini-Yo-We Leadership Conference at the beginning of the summer we have a whole day set aside for training called “A Bigger Tent: Making Space for Every Camper!” where we will focus on equipping our team with an understanding of their own personality and communication styles as well as an appreciation for the wide spectrum of campers that come to Mini-Yo-We!
Feedback: I know that Mini-Yo-We is a Christian Camp. I’d love to know what you are teaching my kids during their week at Camp this summer.
We’re honoured to host guests from a wide variety of faith backgrounds at Mini-Yo-We. It means a lot to us that you would choose to trust our team with your children. We make great efforts to present the teachings of Jesus in a compelling and respectful manner to all of our guests. We don’t apply pressure, and we respect campers from wherever they’re coming from. This summer we’re adding a new feature to allow families to understand what we’re presenting to every camper. After you drop off your kids at Camp, you’ll be given an information card that outlines what we’re teaching that week at Camp. It also includes some contact information if you have any questions!
Feedback: We didn’t see pictures of our kids in the Facebook images! We looked through them all so many times but missed our kids!
Last summer we beta tested a brand new feature to help parents stay connected with their kids during their time at Camp by posting on various social media channels. We learned a lot through this experience, and we had over 1,000,000 interactions on Facebook over the summer! We know that you love this aspect of Mini-Yo-We, so this year we’re investing even more time and effort into our social media channels during the summer time. Stay tuned throughout your child’s time with us to get a peek into what’s going on at Mini-Yo-We! We wish we could guarantee that we will feature your kids, but alas we can only try to feature as wide a variety of campers as possible!
Feedback: The week I wanted to go to Discovery Camp was sold out!
Last June we sold out the entire summer at Discovery Camp! It was so fun to have full camps every week of the summer. However, we heard from a number of guests that they wished they could have come but we didn’t have any space left! Over the winter, we made some changes to the layouts of our accommodations and programming to allow us to squeeze in a few more campers every week. We still have space available at Discovery Camp as we publish this post, but we anticipate all the space, including the few new spots we added, will sell out soon! We believe we’ve reached the optimum size of Discovery Camp as large enough to allow lots of energy but small enough to serve our youngest campers the best way possible.
Feedback: I had a number of things that I wanted to tell my daughter’s cabin leader, so I just wrote them out as a note and gave them to her when we arrived.
Over the years we’ve seen some veteran parents do things that we just love, so we’re encouraging everyone to do them this summer! We’ve noticed that some parents arrive with notes for cabin leaders to help them serve their campers best. We love this! These helpful notes give some tips and advice to our team and help create a great experience for your child. A few weeks before you arrive at Camp we’ll be mailing you the “Summer Excitement Pack” containing a number of goodies to help make your camper’s time at Mini-Yo-We amazing. This package will include a simple form that you can fill out with some helpful tips for your child’s cabin leader. Just fill this out, bring it with you on check in day, and hand it to the cabin leader to bring them up to speed on how we can serve your camper best. This form is optional, but we hope that lots of parents will take advantage of it!