Summer Camps

Hi,


We also have summer camps open to the public and add the campers as prospective candidates in Blackbaud. We will be using Active Works Camps and Class Manager this summer and exporting the data from there and then importing it into Blackbaud (hopefully without glitches). We also would love to know if there is an integrated solution.


Kate Tarpey

DSHA High School

I'd love to hear if you find out anything!


As a dance school we have a two stage audition process: the one-hour audition, and one month of  Summer School for the final audition.


We process the first stage of the auditions through Active Net (not sure I'd recommend it) and process Summer School students through the Blackbaud K-12 products. We do this so both the auditioning and full time students are in the same database. It also makes tracking repeat Summer School students much easier.


We would really prefer to track the first stage auditions, community, adult, and after-school programming through Blackbaud-connected software as well.

We do have a summer camp, and we accept applications and enrollment contracts for summer camp at the same time during the year that we do for the next academic school year.  However, we do not use Smart for the summer contracts, we use Blackbaud Merchant Services to collect a one-time fee.


The way we got around this was very specifically not recommended as best practices by our consultant, so while this is not officially a "Blackbaud Approved" workaround, it has allowed us to manage both summer and academic years simultaneously: We created a new academic year in the system with the help of BB on the backend called 2020-2020 and this is our summer term. Right now, academic years can only be created in the 20XX-20XX format. We also created grades called ST01, ST02, ST03 etc. to differentiate summer term grades from our regular school year grades (they are spelled out: First, Second, Third etc.) 


The main issue we run in to is even though we have written very clear instructions for people applying, they often don't pay attention, and they select the wrong grade, which brings them to the wrong application. However, we've also made it very clear at the top of each application which is summer term and which is the regular year so that even if the parents end up on the wrong app, they usually catch their mistake at that point and reach out to us so we can adjust it on the back end for them.


It's not perfect, but it allows us to keep summer term schedule, admissions, etc. very distinct from the regular school year and it's the best workaround we've found. Last year we tried nestling our summer term into the first part of the regular school year and it caused me the most massive headache. I hope I never have to do it again. It seems to me that if Blackbaud would allow schools to create and name their own academic years (for instance, an academic year called Summer Camp 2020, or Tutoring Program 2019-20, or even After School Clubs 2020-21) that this workaround, could, with some work, become an actual solution to the "summer camp problem". But, that's just conjecture at this point. Best of luck!