Help for Young Life Leaders NOW

Over the summer I normally try to post a couple things that I learned over the previous school year. If you have anything you learned from last year that you would like to tell me about, send it my way smcgever (at) pv dot younglife dot org

Over the years I have noticed a trend with the clubs in our area, the ones that have the most cash deposits in early always bring the most people to camp. Now I don’t believe “having a lot of people at camp” is the holy grail of YL work, and in all honesty it can become an unhealthy idol in our view of our ministry. Yet, I’m sure we can all agree that wanting lots of kids to go to camp is a healthy goal for our work. On the flip side, some of our clubs only make the push to collect actual money a few days before camp. These clubs always have lower numbers of kids at camp.

This year we tried something that I’m sure many of you already do, we gave an incentive to get the deposit in early. For our YL trip we matched up to $50 of a deposit that was in by April 15^th. The deposit from the kids couldn’t be a fundraiser, it had to be actual money.

There was an important reason behind this. When you need actual money, parents usually have to get involved. So many times I’ve seen a kid be a part of several fundraisers, sometimes even earning a significant amount of money, but they don’t go to camp. Usually the culprit is they had none of their own money deposited. They liked hanging out at the fundraisers, maybe did some on their own, but they never had an actual sit-down talk with their parents to ask for the money. This happens less with junior high students since the parents are more in the loop, but this is common with high school students who may be pretty independent, until they need a few hundred dollars.

Our schools that normally bring a lot of kids to camp improved their numbers a little bit, but our schools with historically low numbers did significantly better with this approach.

Do you require a deposit by a certain date? Have you ever matched their money to incentivize signs-ups?

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Here are two fun video videos my friends made. One is to promote weekend camp, the other was for a YL College camp.

I have to be honest. I’ve never seen one episode of Hannah Montana. But I know that it is crazy popular. What does YL do with silly trendy pop stars… we make mock skits of them of course.

With Summer Camp around the corner, let me suggest the following idea which you can tweak to work for yourself.

In case you don’t know, Hannah Montana is the alter-ego of Miley Stewart. Miley is an average girl by day but a famous pop singer by night, Hannah Montana.

How about this. Riley Stewart is a normal high school student by day, but a bigger than life star by night, Banana Montana.

Two characters played by two leaders (or maybe one). Each club they come out one at a time and talk about their favorite parts of camp. Riley highlights the normal part and Banana takes it to the next level.

For example: the blob. Riley says how he is excited to blob his friend, maybe he will blob her 10 feet in the air, “oh and be sure to bring your sunscreen”. (Kinda the nerdy side). Then Riley walks out the door and Banana Montana comes in to loud music. “Waaaaiiit a second… The BLOB… I’M GONNA GO CRAZY ON THAT THING!” You get the idea. You play off the low key to crazy contrast. Maybe, if you have a host or leader who is being interrupted, the leader can play both parts with a super fast costume change. Then the leader give Banana the boot.

Then each week, change the part about camp to highlight. Maybe you show up as Banana Montana on campus and sign autographs.

Did I mention that Banana Montana is in a Banana suit and hands out bananas? Yeah, that should help. The Banana song too.