Building Deeper Connections with Camp Pen Pals

August 15, 2024

The media is full of stories about how kids can feel lonely or disconnected during school breaks at home. More and more, families are seeing the value of extracurricular activities, summer camps, and day camps based on their social and emotional benefits. There’s no doubt that these experiences can provide children with opportunities to build friendships, find new interests, and explore the world in new and exciting ways. 

But how can camps help encourage friendship heading into camp and help those connections continue to grow after camp is over?

Exploring a Modern Camp Pen Pal Program

The idea of a pen pal program may feel a little outdated; after all, people have been sending letters to distant friends since the written language was invented. The first organized pen pal matching services originated in the early 1900’s before most modern forms of communication were popular. In contrast, most of today’s campers were born after the year 2000. 

Even today, learning about letter writing and how to use mail services are still important skill sets for adulthood. Many of today’s camp parents may have fond memories of sending and receiving hand-written communications between friends or relatives when they were young. Combine the nostalgia of those experiences with the fact that many camps appeal to families with technology-free experiences that celebrate time-honored traditions, and camp may truly be the perfect place to explore an old-fashioned letter-writing format for extending camper communications! 

Still, putting pen to paper, buying stamps, addressing an envelope, and dropping it into a mailbox is not a process that too many of us still go through to say hello to someone we know over long distance. When sending a physical letter to a mailing address to facilitate a pen pal program is not ideal, there are plenty of modern equivalents to written letters like online message boards, Facebook Groups, texting, emailing, calling, and even video chats. There is no reason that pen pal programs cannot simply evolve with the way we communicate. All it takes is a little bit of discussion and planning! 

Why Should Camps Help Camp Friends Stay in Touch? 

A pen pal program may be the key to allowing campers to overcome anxiety heading into camp or continue building life-long connections long after returning home from camp. Explore this and other benefits below! 

How Campers Can Benefit from Writing Letters and Messages 

Writing letters and messages can help campers improve their literacy by actively developing reading and writing skill sets. When writing, campers can practice spelling, grammar, and sentence structure. It allows the writer to improve their storytelling abilities. Meanwhile, receiving letters or messages from a camp friend can help the recipient with their reading comprehension skills. 

How Campers Can Benefit from Phone Calls or Virtual Meetings 

If your camp opts out of letters, chats, or message boards for your pen pal program, that’s okay too! There is still much to benefit from if your camp chooses to use phone calls or virtual meetings as your primary form of communication between campers! Using these methods to stay in touch can help campers navigate social etiquette, practice their speaking skills, and provide an opportunity to learn to recognize oral and visual cues common during natural conversation. Learning these skills can be particularly beneficial to those who may end up working in customer service or office environments. 

Why Campers Benefit from Staying Connected Beyond Camp 

In addition to building up practical skill sets, meeting and keeping in touch with camp friends can also provide social and emotional benefits to campers. In a post-COVID environment, many young campers have had to cope with a vastly different social environment for their age group than previous generations. Youths have reported noticeably increased feelings of isolation or loneliness, and several have experienced delayed social milestones as a result (such as attending their first sleepover or school social). For youth who are experiencing these changes to societal norms firsthand, every opportunity to build a relationship and engage with their peers can be precious. 

How Camps Benefit from Campers Staying Connected 

There are many ways that camps can benefit from having campers continue to build the connections they forged at camp. 

Reducing No-Shows and Unhappy Drop-Offs 

Going to camp for the first time could invoke feelings of nervousness, unease, and anxiety with campers. As camp nears, some campers may decide that it’s not something they want to do after all. Pen pal programs which connect campers in the same lodging or activity groups prior to camp can help alleviate those feelings and even replace them with feelings of joy and excitement. Alternatively, establishing pre-camp contact with a counselor or an experienced camper that has gone through similar feelings leading up to camp, can help campers understand that others may be feeling the same way and that they can still have a great time. 

Showing Your Camp Cares 

A pen pal program is a golden opportunity to demonstrate that your camp team cares about the well-being of campers beyond their at-camp experiences. Popular brands, experiences, and destinations often tap into the power of emotions and lifestyle benefits to sell their products and services – emotions such as feeling seen and heard, accepted, or special. While it's unlikely that a lack of a pen pal system will be a dealbreaker for camp families when considering which camp to register for, it could be a differentiator that taps into the emotional needs of the students who attend camp specifically to make friends and connections. 

Encourage Returning Campers & Camp Loyalty 

For campers who forge friendships at your camp but don’t live near each other, supporting those camp friendships with a pen pal system may help drive loyalty. By staying in touch over their shared camp experience, campers could be more likely to return to your camp to strengthen their bond, repeat past experiences, or explore new camp activities together. 

How to Start a Pen Pal Program 

Below are a few quick tips and guidelines to follow when setting up your camp’s first pen pal program! 



Setting Goals for Your Camp Pen Pal Program 

The first step in any successful planning project is to identify what you wish to achieve. For example, the goals for your camp pen pal program may be to: 

• Improve overall camper satisfaction. 
• Help campers create more lasting friendships. 
• Increase the number of returning campers. 

Setting clear goals allows you to identify a method to measure your success. For example, if your goal is to increase overall camper satisfaction – you might distribute and compare camper experience survey results from before your implementation of a camp pen pal program and after. 

Determine the Format of Pen Pal Communications 

There are a lot of different ways to communicate in today’s world. Choosing the best one can feel overwhelming. Factors that you might consider when determining what method(s) of communication to support include accessibility (access to reliable phone, internet or mailing services), language barriers, accommodating students with disabilities or special needs, or even the ability to moderate content. Remember, you can always change things up later if the method you choose is not working. 

Establishing Rules and Guidelines for Camper Participation 

As with most optional programs at camp—it will be crucial that your camp team clearly outlines rules and guidelines for participation. This can involve agreements to keep contact information confidential, rules about the content of pen pal communications, ways to report rule-breaking, defining eligibility based on age or behavior, and details such as how to opt in and opt out of the program. 

Define Your Camp’s Involvement in the Pen Pal Program 

Another item to consider is outlining the methods used to conduct the pen pal program and how involved your camp wishes to be with the process. 

For example, some questions you will need to address are: 

• How and when will campers be paired or grouped? 
• If staff create pen pal pairs, will camper preferences be considered? 
• Can campers have more than one pen pal? 
• Can campers request a change of pen pal? 
• What contact information will you share directly and how? 
• What steps do you take to protect contact details? 
• Will your team be directly involved in the communications process? 
• How will camp families reach out to ask questions or submit concerns? 
• How will you 

These questions provide essential discussion points to ensure you have the required resources available for the program and the support of camp families to help launch it. 

Evaluate and Adjust Your Pen Pal Program 

After your pen pal program gets off the ground, you will need to follow through with measuring the program’s progress and keeping it on track with short-term goals, program milestones, and other measurements related to participation and satisfaction. Having these measurements in place will allow your team to have important conversations about whether it is having the intended impact, whether it adds significant value for participants, and how it may need to be updated to address concerns or better accomplish your goals. 

Looking for More Ideas to Improve Your Camp? 

At iCampPro, we’re bringing more than a few good ideas to the table. We’re crafting camp software from the ground up based on camp feedback and real-life processes, to help you streamline everyday activities like registration, payment processing, communications, seasonal hiring, camper health management, and more! All of this to help your camp staff spend less time in the office and get back to providing the world’s best camp experiences. Check out our features or schedule a demo to learn first-hand what makes iCampPro the best camp management software for overnight, day and family camps!