2 Central Saanich dads just made summer camp planning a lot less painful

A pair of Central Saanich fathers who met in a school parking lot and commiserated about how confusing it can be to get their children enrolled in summer camp believe they’ve found a way to save parents some time and possibly aggravation.

“There's just so many providers out there, and they all have different websites, and they all have different ways of formatting the information," says Craig Frew, co-developer of a new app called CampMatch, which could save parents from sifting through dozens of websites in search of the ideal camp for their kid.

Frew says he thinks he speaks for many parents when he says it’s difficult to put together a summer plan for their kids because there's no centralized place to compare the myriad options.

“You kind of have to go to like, 15, 20 different websites—just through Googling—register at all of them, try to find something that fits your schedule and has before- and after-care, so you end up sitting there for usually, like a weekend with a spreadsheet,” says Michael Doyle, who like his app partner Frew, has two boys.

Not looking forward to another weekend peering into an imposing spreadsheet, they decided that parents need a one-stop place to shop for camps. So, turning to their web backgrounds, they pulled data from BC and Alberta rec centres, schools, and municipalities and put it all onto one site.

CampMatch is a database of more than 6,000 camps, public and private. Parents can use it to compare options and make their kids’ summer-camp plans all in one place.

“So, you can essentially add your kid, put their age or their grade, what their swimming level is, what their bike level is, and it can either recommend—or you could search based on those parameters—exactly what you need for your kids, and pretty much build a schedule. That would have taken you, like a day before, in like 20 minutes,” Doyle tells Capital Daily.

Parents still have to navigate to those sites to register and pay (more on that below), Doyle says, but the app can do much of the time-consuming heavy lifting.

“We have the data to show that there are spots available: This is how much it costs. This is where it is, so you're not driving to the wrong side of town. This is how far away it is from your house—all that jazz.”

Frew said there are hundreds of camp options in Victoria—private and municipal—each with its own registration site and booking system.

The City of Victoria is expected to make its upcoming spring camp programming options available online on March 2, giving parents one week to decide before the March 9 registration deadline.

A sneak peek of summer options goes live March 30, with registration set two weeks later, on April 3.

We gave it a go...

A fictional entry by Capital Daily for camp options for a 10-year-old in James Bay reveals screenfuls of options from bike camp to outdoor adventures, and includes such vital information as camp dates, age brackets, times, distances, and prices. There’s even a description of the camp activity and, conveniently, a big orange Register Now button that connects to the camps' sites.

Frew calls it one-stop shopping for parents to organize a big part of their summer, especially for those families where both parents work, and it's necessary that their kids attend a camp for the entire spring break or full summer.

“So the stress is actually quite high to make sure that the kids are in a camp for the whole time,” he says.

In the beginning...

Two years ago, while picking up their boys at school, Frew and Doyle compared notes about the challenges they faced trying to enroll their kids into their favoured camps. This past Christmas, they rolled up their sleeves, started parsing data, and came up with the makings of the app.

“And then, you know, within probably about two months, we were at the point where it's like, ‘let's show people.’”

The app—which is free—is very Victoria- and Vancouver-centric and provides some basic information for camps across Canada, with more details and information likely to be added.

Frew calls it “an evolving platform" and says reviews from the 3,000 or so parents who have used it in the two weeks since it went live have been very positive.

“We've actually reached out to quite a lot of the PACs—the parent advisory councils—and they've been impressed enough with it that they've actually shared it in their newsletters.”