https://www.ilove.camp/blog Matt Kaufman on belonging, leadership, and AI tools for camp professionals. en-us https://www.ilove.camp/post/ai-tools-for-camp-professionals-rippling-and-ispring-learn https://www.ilove.camp/post/ai-tools-for-camp-professionals-rippling-and-ispring-learn Sat, 28 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT AI Tools Every camp director I know is carrying two problems that never fully go away. The first is the chaos of managing a workforce that doubles or triples in size every June and then disappears by August. The second is getting that workforce trained, certified, and ready before the first camper walks through the gate. This week I looked at two tools built for exactly those problems: Rippling for workforce management and iSpring Learn for staff training.RipplingWhat It DoesRippling is a workforce manag https://www.ilove.camp/post/camp-directors-knew-day-one-before-bezos-did https://www.ilove.camp/post/camp-directors-knew-day-one-before-bezos-did Thu, 26 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT Leadership Jeff Bezos has a saying he has repeated for years inside Amazon. He tells his employees: "It is always Day One."It became a famous slogan. Bezos even named one of Amazon's Seattle office buildings Day 1. When people asked him what happens on Day Two, he didn't hesitate. Day Two is staleness, he said. Irrelevance follows. Then painful decline.Camp directors figured this out long before Bezos had a building to name.Every summer, something remarkable happens at camps across the country. Several hun https://www.ilove.camp/post/your-fidgety-employee-isn-t-broken-the-desk-is https://www.ilove.camp/post/your-fidgety-employee-isn-t-broken-the-desk-is Tue, 24 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT Leadership There's always one. The person on your team who can't sit still. They pace during phone calls. They stand up at their desk. They tap their foot during meetings and get up for water three times in an hour. You've probably watched them and wondered if something is wrong.Nothing is wrong. The desk is.For more than a century, summer camps have been running the world's quietest experiment in human performance. They didn't set out to study movement science. They just knew, intuitively, that children c https://www.ilove.camp/post/two-ai-tools-that-could-change-how-your-camp-runs-coda-and-dialpad https://www.ilove.camp/post/two-ai-tools-that-could-change-how-your-camp-runs-coda-and-dialpad Sat, 21 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT AI Tools Camp directors live in a world of institutional knowledge that lives in people's heads and phone calls that disappear the moment they end. The staff handbook from 2019 is somewhere in a shared drive. The parent who called last Tuesday to ask about medications said something important, and whoever took the call wrote it down somewhere. Maybe.This week's tools take on two of the most persistent organizational challenges in camp: keeping everyone aligned on how things are done, and making sure impo https://www.ilove.camp/post/ai-can-write-code-but-can-t-comfort-a-crying-child https://www.ilove.camp/post/ai-can-write-code-but-can-t-comfort-a-crying-child Thu, 19 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT AI Tools There's a popular idea floating around right now that AI is going to take over the easy jobs and leave humans with the hard ones.It's backwards.AI is extraordinary at the hard things. Give it a complex coding problem, a research brief, a financial model, a 10,000-word document to summarize. It will outperform most humans, most of the time, in ways that would have seemed impossible five years ago.But ask it to sit with a crying child until the crying stops? To notice that someone's laugh sounds s https://www.ilove.camp/post/you-optimized-communication-and-accidentally-killed-culture https://www.ilove.camp/post/you-optimized-communication-and-accidentally-killed-culture Mon, 16 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT Leadership You did everything right.You set up Slack so the team could stop drowning in email. You created channels for every project. You built a system where anyone could find anything, where no message would get lost, where communication would be fast and clean and efficient.And then, slowly, something started to feel off. The work got done. The projects moved forward. But something underneath it all went quiet. You just couldn't figure out what it was.Here's what it was: the hallway.The Conversation Th https://www.ilove.camp/post/ai-tools-for-camp-professionals-homebase-and-tidio https://www.ilove.camp/post/ai-tools-for-camp-professionals-homebase-and-tidio Sat, 14 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT AI Tools Every camp director knows the two bottlenecks that eat up the most time in the off-season: managing your team's schedule and answering the same parent questions over and over. "What time is drop-off?" "Is there a payment plan?" "My child has allergies, who do I contact?" These aren't complex problems. They're repetitive ones. And repetitive problems are exactly where the right tools can give you hours back. This week, we're looking at Homebase for scheduling and team management and Tidio for AI- https://www.ilove.camp/post/your-hybrid-policy-created-two-classes-of-employees https://www.ilove.camp/post/your-hybrid-policy-created-two-classes-of-employees Thu, 12 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT Belonging Picture a campfire. Twelve people sit in a circle. The fire throws light and warmth evenly. Everyone can see everyone else's face. The conversation moves naturally because the environment is shared. No one is closer to the flame than anyone else.Now imagine that same campfire, but five of the twelve people are sitting thirty feet back, in the dark. They can see the glow. They can hear fragments of the conversation if the wind is right. Occasionally someone by the fire turns around and shouts an https://www.ilove.camp/post/your-phone-doesn-t-have-to-ring-to-ruin-your-meeting https://www.ilove.camp/post/your-phone-doesn-t-have-to-ring-to-ruin-your-meeting Mon, 09 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT Belonging You're sitting across from a counselor who asked for a few minutes of your time. She's been struggling with a camper in her group, and you can tell it's been weighing on her. She starts talking, slowly at first, testing whether it's safe to be honest.Your phone is on the table between you. Face down. Silent. You haven't touched it once.It doesn't matter. The phone has already changed the conversation.The Invisible GuestIn 2014, researchers at Virginia Tech studied what happens to real conversati https://www.ilove.camp/post/ai-tools-for-camp-professionals-vyond-and-grammarly https://www.ilove.camp/post/ai-tools-for-camp-professionals-vyond-and-grammarly Sat, 07 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT AI Tools Camp professionals wear a lot of hats. You're writing parent emails in the morning, building staff training materials in the afternoon, and drafting social media captions at night. Two of the most time-consuming parts of that workload are creating video content and making sure your written communication sounds polished, clear, and on-brand. This week, we're looking at two tools that tackle those problems from very different angles: Vyond for animated video creation and Grammarly for AI-powered w https://www.ilove.camp/post/chimps-lead-through-fear-you-have-another-option https://www.ilove.camp/post/chimps-lead-through-fear-you-have-another-option Thu, 05 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT Leadership I once watched a head counselor run a staff meeting by going around the room and asking every person what they could have done better that week. Not what went well. Not what they learned. What they could have done better.The room was quiet. Not the good kind of quiet, where people are thinking. The bad kind, where people are calculating. Figuring out the safest thing to say. Trying not to be noticed.One counselor gave a careful, vague answer about time management. Another said something about be https://www.ilove.camp/post/you-think-you-re-the-engine-you-re-the-bottleneck https://www.ilove.camp/post/you-think-you-re-the-engine-you-re-the-bottleneck Mon, 02 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT Leadership There was a camp director who prided himself on being available. His door was always open. His phone was always on. Every question, no matter how small, got his attention. A counselor needed to know which bus a camper was on? He answered. The kitchen needed to confirm Tuesday's menu? He confirmed. A parent wanted to know if sunscreen was reapplied after swimming? He personally called back.He wasn't delegating. He was absorbing.His staff loved him for it, at first. He was responsive, caring, pres https://www.ilove.camp/post/ai-tools-for-camp-professionals-missive-and-hootsuite https://www.ilove.camp/post/ai-tools-for-camp-professionals-missive-and-hootsuite Sat, 28 Feb 2026 12:00:00 GMT AI Tools Your camp office has a communication problem. Not the kind where people aren't talking. The kind where they're talking everywhere: email, text, Instagram DMs, Facebook messages, and that one parent who still calls the main line. Meanwhile, your social media goes quiet every March because enrollment season swallows all your time.This week, we're looking at two tools that tackle different sides of camp communication. Missive puts all your team's conversations in one place, while Hootsuite uses AI https://www.ilove.camp/post/90-seconds-to-transform-your-team-s-entire-week https://www.ilove.camp/post/90-seconds-to-transform-your-team-s-entire-week Thu, 26 Feb 2026 12:00:00 GMT Belonging Your Monday morning meeting starts the same way every time. Someone shares their screen. Someone reads through the agenda. Someone asks if there are questions. There aren't. You move on to status updates, action items, and then everyone returns to their separate corners.Now imagine something different. Before the agenda, before anyone shares a screen, you ask one question: "What's one word that describes how you're showing up today?"It takes 90 seconds. And it will change your team more than any https://www.ilove.camp/post/garage-doors-vs-porches-why-your-workplace-feels-empty https://www.ilove.camp/post/garage-doors-vs-porches-why-your-workplace-feels-empty Mon, 23 Feb 2026 12:00:00 GMT Belonging Drive through almost any neighborhood built after 1970 and count the front porches. Then count the garage doors. You already know which number is bigger.This isn't an accident. It's a design choice that reshaped how Americans interact with each other, and it happened so gradually that most of us never noticed.From Porch to PatioIn 1975, historian Richard Thomas published an essay called "From Porch to Patio" in the journal of the Iowa State Historical Society. The front porch, he argued, was whe https://www.ilove.camp/post/ai-tools-for-camp-professionals-lindy-ai-and-tango https://www.ilove.camp/post/ai-tools-for-camp-professionals-lindy-ai-and-tango Sat, 21 Feb 2026 12:00:00 GMT AI Tools Every camp director I know wears at least five hats. You're scheduling staff, emailing parents, updating your website, training new counselors, and somewhere in between, trying to remember whether you responded to that facilities vendor from last Tuesday. The promise of AI isn't that it replaces any of those hats. It's that it helps you switch between them a little faster and with fewer things falling through the cracks. This week, I'm looking at two tools that tackle two very different parts of https://www.ilove.camp/post/the-chemistry-that-bonds-your-team-can-also-poison-it https://www.ilove.camp/post/the-chemistry-that-bonds-your-team-can-also-poison-it Thu, 19 Feb 2026 12:00:00 GMT Belonging You've built a great team. They finish each other's sentences. They have inside jokes that make no sense to anyone else. They grab lunch together without planning it. New ideas flow easily because trust is already there.It feels like exactly what you've been trying to create. And it might be the beginning of a problem you don't see coming.The Shadow Side of BelongingOxytocin is the neurochemical of trust and connection. It is the biological glue that turns a group of strangers into a team. I've https://www.ilove.camp/post/your-team-isn-t-resistant-to-change-they-re-terrified https://www.ilove.camp/post/your-team-isn-t-resistant-to-change-they-re-terrified Mon, 16 Feb 2026 12:00:00 GMT Belonging You roll out the new initiative. You explain the vision. You share the timeline. You ask for questions.Silence.You try again the next week. You reframe the message. You add a slide. You emphasize the opportunity. You ask who wants to lead the first phase.More silence. Maybe a couple of polite nods.You walk away thinking your team is resistant to change. That they're stuck in their ways. That they don't care enough to try something new.But resistance isn't what you're seeing. What you're seeing i https://www.ilove.camp/post/ai-tools-for-camp-professionals-opus-clip-and-canva-magic-studio https://www.ilove.camp/post/ai-tools-for-camp-professionals-opus-clip-and-canva-magic-studio Sat, 14 Feb 2026 12:00:00 GMT AI Tools Your camp produces more content than you think. Every event, every performance, every silly moment at the pool is a potential marketing asset. The problem isn't capturing it. Most camps have staff or parents snapping photos and shooting video all summer long. The problem is turning that raw material into something polished enough to post, and doing it fast enough that the moment still feels fresh.Two AI tools are making that process dramatically easier. One takes your long videos and turns them https://www.ilove.camp/post/you-can-t-preach-balance-while-emailing-at-midnight https://www.ilove.camp/post/you-can-t-preach-balance-while-emailing-at-midnight Thu, 12 Feb 2026 12:00:00 GMT Leadership It's Sunday night. You're on the couch. The TV is on, but you're not watching it. Your laptop is open, and the blue light is cutting through the dark room. You tell yourself you're just "clearing the deck." Getting ahead of Monday. Being responsible.You type a quick message to your team about some numbers that don't look right. You send it. You open another draft, this one to your lead developer about a technical question. You send that, too. You feel a small hit of dopamine. Productive. Efficie