Revenue-positive change enabled for Camp America

An Attacat case study

Camp America is the largest international provider of opportunities for young people to work in summer camps across the USA.

A short interview with the client

Video transcript

Katy Yucel, Marketing Director, Camp America:
"All of our results are totally up. We're tracking it like 130 percent on applications this year. And I think it is all attributed to these changes. It's been hugely impactful having them and I feel empowered that we can keep making changes quickly and it's really changing the landscape of how we work day to day.....

The stages that people got involved was very early. So they could all see, Oh, the potential in their area. The sessions that we held with the training was. very inclusive and with the handholding we got, it allowed people the space, and encouraged them to really go and explore on their own and work out the capabilities and feel like empowered to do so.

A big project was our events. We had a lot of systems involved. It was very messy and fragmented and they've completely fine tuned the whole process for us. It's all in HubSpot now and it's phenomenal! We've got an event in March and I'm like, I should be panicking. I should be pulling data and having to manipulate it. But they've done these nurturing programs for us, which have been a real game changer. . It's made my day to day so much less stressful.

You can feel with other companies that you're just a work cue somewhere. With them, it's all about the person to person communication to the point where, when they did our events project, Attacat actually came to our event. So they saw their results live in action.

If there was someone on the fence about working with Attacat, I would say, don't be on the fence. They're brilliant. Jump right in. What you get with Attacat is genuine people who know their stuff. They like business. The more complicated, the better. Some of our stuff is very complicated but they want to get under the hood of it and then work out a better process for us.

I would say, definitely go ahead and work with them.

The full story

Introduction

Camp America is a well-established brand, having been founded in 1969. They handle more than 100,000 enquiries a year resulting in around 10,000 young people crossing the Atlantic to work in summer camps.

The UK marketing team approached Attacat after identifying HubSpot to meet their need for a CRM replacement. This was driven by a desire to increase the levels of automation as well as increasing the conversion rate from enquiry to application.

The challenge

With multiple systems and spreadsheets, Camp America were struggling to tailor their marketing or provide as joined-up an experience to potential applicants as they would like to be offering.

With customer data in different places, combining it in any way would always eat up a lot of time. Likewise proving return on investment or identifying drop-off points in the customer journey was hard enough to become close to impractical. A further challenge was managing their large events as part of their marketing process. It was incredibly labour intensive and involved a lot of paper!

The approach

The initial requirement was to migrate and onboard the marketing team onto HubSpot. This involved migrating away from an on-prem Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Microsoft’s marketing automation product, Click Dimensions. There was also a need to integrate their custom application management system.

Although initially seen as a marketing team project by Camp America, Attacat were keen to emphasise the potential for HubSpot to enable operational improvements across the company.

User requirements gathering

By capturing the detail of what needed to be migrated, as well as identifying gaps, we could develop the requirements for the initial migration and a plan for future phases. Getting early involvement from staff across the business was also key to the project being seen as delivering much more than just a marketing CRM.

Implementing and integrating

The initial objectives included migrating away from Microsoft Dynamics 365, streamlining current processes and improving the measurement of marketing activities. A key element was automating the promotion of relevant openings to applicants with specific skills to increase the conversion rate.

Training and user adoption

Formal training as well as hand-holding and in-person support were all part of the mix. The key to its success was getting staff involved in the requirements stage so they were already bought in.

Ongoing support and implementation

The initial migration and onboarding was just stage one. Since then, Attacat and Camp America have embarked on a program of continuous change to make the maximum use of HubSpot to increase efficiencies and improve the customer experience. This includes:

  • lead scoring,
  • a bespoke events management tool created within HubSpot for managing the recruitment events
  • Integrating SMS
  • onboarding the operations team
  • building a partner referral program process
  • Creating a refer-a-friend process
  • Linking PPC landing pages to their data hub

The results

29%

Increase in event attendance

28%

increase in placements

12% faster

annual placement target reached

1 key tool

unifying customer comms

And on to the next team, and the next...

The initial marketing team were onboarded in early 2024. Since then, Attacat and Camp America have continued to work closely, delivering additional change. This includes working with the US team who had previously been looked after by one of those big HubSpot agencies. They have since opted for the more personal and visionary Attacat experience!

"What you get with Attacat is genuine people who know their stuff. They like business. The more complicated, the better. Some of our stuff is very complicated but they want to get under the hood of it and then work out a better process for us. I would say, definitely go ahead and work with them."

– Katy Yucel, Marketing Director at Camp America

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