As one might expect, our company’s “year” revolves around the summer. August 31 is our fiscal year end and it represents the closing of one season and the start of a new one. As we begin a new season, I would like to reflect back on a few items from the last one.

We created a number of new positions, reflecting our growth and maturation.

At the beginning of the season, Charlotte moved into the Training and Communications Coordinator role. Having spent four years in our operations team serving clients, Charlotte knows our product, the needs of our team and our camps. This role focuses on primary training for our team (e.g. new hires, software releases), preparation of training materials (e.g. videos, how-to summaries) and communication (e.g. newsletters, software release notes).

The culture of our company and the general wellness of our team is, in many ways, our first priority. Without an amazing group of people, we simply cannot build the product we want and service our clients with the care we want. So, we hired Miriam to be our Culture Coordinator. Miriam is the builder, keeper and nurturer of our culture. We value fun, wellness, environmental consciousness, continuous learning, open communication and inclusiveness and she focuses on these items every day.

In the Spring, we hired our first Chief Information Security Officer, John. The technical environment only continues to grow in complexity and it has become essential to have someone whose only focus is security – policies, procedures, regular practices, etc. John has had a long career focused on this area and we were delighted to bring someone on board with his level of expertise and experience.

Many of you will know Mo. He probably built some of your customized reports over the last 7 years. Mo moved to a new gig with us as a Site Reliability Specialist. As mentioned above, the technical infrastructure only gets more complex and our product only continues to expand. It was time to have someone solely focused on the performance of our overall system and infrastructure.

It is interesting to note that you may not have cause to chat with any of these folks but know that they are working hard to ensure your experience is top notch.

We completed fundraising.

I am really proud of our product development team. It is a strong multi-disciplinary group of smart people (product owners, front and back end developers, UX/UI specialists, QA, scrum master) and they have added this incredible module to CampBrain. If you are in the fundraising business and you do not require a higher end, more complex donor product (e.g. Raiser’s Edge), then you will want to see our new module. I would highlight 4 things about it: 

1. Communicating with your constituents is elegant because we have created a unique way to maintain unlimited donor/prospect lists, drawing from all parts of the database; 
2. You will love the ability to quickly setup multiple online giving pages; 
3. We have made acknowledging and thanking your donors streamlined and professional; 
4. This is one system to manage everything without duplication of records – it is the same person record used for donations, group leader, staff involvement, camp registrant or family member. 

We are retiring Desktop.

Technically, this officially happens in October. But, the heavy lifting has been completed and we have transferred just about everyone over to the Web version. It is time to say goodbye to our Desktop version, 25 years after it was created. We have fond memories but we are also glad to close that chapter. We chose October 21^st as the official retirement date because it was on that day, 6 years ago, that we launched the Web version. Thanks for a great 25 years, old friend.

There is so much more that I could have written about, reflecting on the season that has passed. I will stick to those 3 highlights and simply say that we are better positioned than ever to deliver on our promise: To create tools for camp administrators that are intuitive, smart, elegant, useful and a total pleasure to use and support the people that use those tools with passion, friendliness, conviction and an unwavering desire to delight.

Thanks for your support this past season.