sign up

Okay, I know. Most of us have just started fall programming and to begin thinking about winter trips feels like we are jumping ahead. But the truth of the matter is that this is actually a little bit late when it comes to planning.

When it came to calendar planning, I used to function simply by thinking about the next big thing or event that was dropping. Essentially I was trying to build a calendar one event after another because that’s the only thing I knew. We’d kick off fall programming and just before Halloween, I’d begin thinking about our winter trip in January.

Can I just be honest and tell you that thinking and working in that type of model is completely stressful and unhealthy? It will run you over and deplete you, leading toward burnout and resentment. Instead, I want to encourage you to plan ahead! Start thinking about your calendar for the fall and winter in the spring of the year prior.

We have been blessed to go to an amazing winter camp within our denomination that truly suits the needs and aligns with the vision of our ministry. They have started communicating with youth workers in April about their dates for the upcoming winter retreats. That means we know when we are going by the end of April and can begin getting quotes for transportation and preparing our sign ups.

When you plan ahead it allows you to spread out the work load and to begin preparing before the normal routines add additional pressure and weight to your schedule. It allows you to start generating excitement, start sign ups early, recruit leaders and/or drivers, and encourage your students to invite their friends.

All of these things mean you are better prepared and equipped for the coming trip and the coming year. So here’s how I would encourage you to set up planning for your winter retreat from a scheduling approach—not programmatic or all of the details that go into the planning:

March – May of the year prior: Begin conversations with the place you are going and confirm the dates you will attend.

March – July of the year prior: Start obtaining transportation quotes or drivers for your trip. Confirm the quotes and/or drivers and make sure you have a contingency plan for illness and/or weather.

August – September of the year prior: Start sharing the information with your leaders and begin to have them sign up.

September – October of the year prior: Start to share the information with your students. Open sign ups with the intent of closing sign ups by the end of October.

October – January: Craft training material for the leaders who are going on the trip. Put together any resources or materials needed for students. Prep your first aid kits. Host a leader training to equip your leaders. Send out packing lists and trip information to students and families. Prepare your check in process for the trip.

January – Departure: Continue to hype up the trip and generate excitement for your students.

This year we filled up our winter retreat sign ups faster than we ever have before and with our highest number of people attending. To be perfectly honest, I was pleasantly surprised by this. We have filled the retreat quickly over the past few years but never this fast. We filled all of our spots in less than an hour.

Please don’t hear this as a humble brag or a prideful moment. This is something that we have been working on for a long time and honestly have had to battle pretty hard to accomplish. If you’re like me, you may have had your fair share of struggles when it comes to getting people to sign up for trips, activities, and events, so I want to share with you some of tricks we have used to increase sign ups and fill trips earlier.

Leverage communication.

Communication is so important and necessary. We began communicating at the very beginning of this semester (September) for a winter trip happening in January. We didn’t have all the details figured out, but we knew the dates and the approximate number we would be taking.

So we shared those details with students and families as well as when sign ups would go live and that they were first-come first-served. We continued to send out monthly updates, post on social media, communicate at youth group, and send specific emails to all families as the sign up got closer. The clearer and more concise your communication, the more likely it is to be passed along, remembered, and acted upon.

Generate FOMO.

I’ll be honest: we generate a bit of angst with how we handle our sign ups. We hype up the trip, we post videos and photos, and we push how limited our spots are and how quickly we have filled in the past. We also give our students a challenge of beating our old sign up time.

What we are doing is creating the fear of missing out, which drives students to sign up faster. In fact, this year we closed our winter retreat sign up in forty minutes for a trip that had 140 spots available. When you cultivate a desire, and help students to see the importance of joining the trip, they will instinctively want to sign up as soon as possible.

Build excitement.

Our students love our winter retreat so much, in some ways even more than our summer trips. But that wasn’t always the case. We used to have low attendance for the winter trip, so we worked hard to build the excitement and anticipation for the trip.

We have students explain why their peers should go, our leaders hype it up, we watch recap videos from the year before, we highlight big moments from past trips, and we talk about it a lot. This builds the excitement for the trip, and when students are excited about something they talk about it. And since they are talking about and waiting for it, they are quick to sign up once the sign up goes live.

Tell stories.

We always try to share stories about the activities we have planned. If we are going to our winter retreat we share a hype video, students share about their experiences, and we put up photos on our social media channels with stories from the year before. These generate a lot of excitement and anticipation for what is coming.

Create a challenge and invitation.

I love to give my group a challenge. In fact, at our last winter retreat our speaker challenged every student to invite a friend or two for the following year, and our leadership team ran with that challenge. Throughout the last year we continued to bring up this challenge of growing the number of people we will take to camp and inviting friends. We let them know we believed in them and knew they would rise to the challenge. Our students took this challenge and they ran with it. We saw our numbers increase and first time guests sign up for winter camp.

Utilize a pay scale.

One of the other ways we get families to sign up sooner than later is by having a sliding pay scale. We share that the price of the trip goes up the longer you wait to sign up. Now we don’t raise the price daily, but we do raise it at the end of every week or two by $25-$50. This may not seem like a lot, but when a camp that’s $100 goes to $125 or $150, it generates a desire to sign up sooner so you won’t have to pay the increased cost. When we first started this we still had families who waited but now, we have very few, if any, who wait. They know their student wants to go and they also want to save money so they sign up right away.