5 Tips to Simplify Reopening Camps and Other Youth Programs
| Written by
Elissa K. Miller | 
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Youth programs are on the rebound, and families will be eager to enroll their kids in your enriching and engaging programs. Here are five important ways to simplify registration, payments and attendance as youth programs begin again.
- Capacity management and waitlists are crucial. Depending on your area, you may be enrolling programs at a portion of your usual capacity. If conditions improve, you’ll want to quickly fill newly available slots. Creating a waitlist makes it easy to add registrants to match changes in capacity in an orderly manner.
- Registration forms, agreements and waivers are more important than ever. Moving forward, it's going to be more important than ever to make sure that your community understands and agrees to liability waivers, behavior guidelines and any special check-in procedures (like a temperature check). Long forms can become unwieldy, so use features like conditional logic to hide items until they’re relevant and shared forms so that families can fill out a common form once and have it apply to all of their registrations.
- Help families deal with financial uncertainty, and offer installment payments on a payment schedule. To streamline future payments, offer the option of automatic billing. If automatic billing is declined, scheduling reminders with links to payment pages can eliminate hours of work for your staff.
- Have a backup plan for cancellations. Doubleknot makes it easy to issue refunds to gift cards so families retain the full value of their purchase and the funds remain on your books. The gift card balance can be used for any future purchase.
- Eliminate lines with contact-free check-in. With our Sales Station app for iOS, long check-in lines are essentially eliminated. Your staff doesn't need to drag boxes of folders to the check-in area, and any staff member can check in any participant to help the line move quickly. Staff can also update registrations, collect any balance due, sell merchandise and even collect donations. Best of all, check-in and check-out are contact-free: Staff can scan a QR code, or look up participants by name or order number. You can even check in an entire group with a single tap!