Wow! After what can only be described as an unprecedented first two days of registration, we are still catching our breath!
The Early Bird “Waitlist”
So, there’s a big question about what happened in that first 20 minutes, and why the system started a waitlist for Early Bird instead of taking registrations at the regular rate. If you want the inside baseball about how the ACTIVE system works, keep reading. If not, you can skip the next two paragraphs.
In order to have a set # of Early Bird spots, we have to enter a separate “tuition” rate for JC and SC Individual Groups and Tracks, so 4 additional “tuitions”. These have limits on how many they can sell, and we add a little cushion in case it’s not an even split. Once we hit 100, we manually switch over to the regular rate. We can’t just set a global discount and have it count the total number of Campers up to 100 – that would be perfect, but ACTIVE doesn’t work that way. To make it less confusing for people registering, we would set the regular rate to be invisible on your end until we manually switched it over. Normally, that’s not a problem. When we hit the limit, there’s usually time to manually go through and make the regular rate the one that’s visible instead.
Sunday morning, though, the response was so massive that all of the Early Bird spots were snapped up and sitting in people’s carts as they filled out the forms. Since the regular tuition wasn’t visible yet, the system started a waitlist for Early Bird instead of just saying that they were sold out. To make matters more confusing, there were spots open at the Early Bird rate for JC and SC Tracks. We were deep into some undocumented behavior from the ACTIVE system, so we’re going to set it up differently next year:
Next year, we will have both the Early Bird and regular rates shown from the beginning of registration. If you see Early Bird showing, then there is still a spot left at that rate. When it sells out, the regular rate will still be showing. The first page will be slightly more cluttered when you first start registering, but it will keep us from having a repeat of Sunday.
All 54 students who were mistakenly put on a waitlist because of this were brought into confirmed registrations as of Sunday evening.
The Actual Waitlist
It’s crazy that I’m writing about a waitlist on March 3rd, but that’s a real thing! We build in a couple of points to “pump the brakes” on registration so we can be sure we’re OK on space (The # of males/females and # of students/adults factor into that). Normally it’s like a brake run on a roller coaster: You might notice it a little bit, 4 or 5 kids get on a waitlist for a few hours, then we open it back up. Sunday was like someone dropped a mile-long freight train onto Mindbender at Six Flags. It was a big pileup – while there were kids on the Early Bird “waitlist” still, we hit our first point to pump the brakes and then registrations kept coming. Our first step was to deal with the Early Bird “waitlist” as outlined above.
Now, we see lots of familiar names on the actual waitlist, and we want to say: don’t worry! If you’re on it right now, you’re almost certainly going to Camp! We are taking a couple of days to work through the following things before we start taking Campers from the waitlist:
- Be sure we hold enough spots for adults, because groups always take longer to register adults while they figure out their work schedules and other commitments.
- Eliminate any duplicate registrations, and fix any registrations that selected too many Neat! Groups.
- Ensure that we only confirm registrations that we have a bed for. I’ve explained this in-depth before, but it’s not just a total # of beds. We have to see what our splits look like for this year, and see how many more male and female Campers we can take while still holding space for the adults.
There’s another factor this year: Woodland’s new cabin. All of the recent rains have kept the crew from finishing the grading. And while we are still more than 3 and a half months out from Camp and can reasonably expect there to be time to finish the cabin between now and then, it’s still something we have to consider. We’re not going to commit to 26 more Campers and adults if we’re not certain we can follow through on that commitment.
We will have more updates as we have more news. If you’re on the waitlist, watch your inbox for confirmation emails and send your Neat! Group choices to info@campvineyard.com. Zip Line is totally full, Giant Swing is close behind. If you’re selecting individual groups, send us your 3 main choices plus one alternate if you’re picking one of the popular ones.
Thanks for your patience!