Updates From HQ (Jan 2024)

💻 We’ve hired 2 full time senior software engineers, Nathan & Cem, to rebuild Enrolment from the ground up!!!! Nathan is a Camp Wildfire attendee so knows all the pain points intimately. Huge thanks to Guy from the Wildkind community who steered us through the hiring process to ensure we didn’t repeat our previous mistakes. This is a HUGE step and is going to unlock so many improvements and opportunities.

This brings our team to 8x full-time and 1x part-time employees. It's super exciting but will challenge our leadership skills 😬 We hope we can do their talents justice and provide them with everything they need to flourish.

We’re outgrowing our tiny archway office in Brixton now. It’s been our home for 5+ years so will be sad to leave (for most of us, Charlotte is desperate to move!) 📦📦📦.

In October, we took the team away for a ‘planning retreat’ to give them a mini camp experience and inspiration for the year ahead. We stayed in a beautiful Pinetum like ours. We went windsurfing, played games, had wood-fired hot tubs, and got loads of work done 🛶🕺🌲.

We are hiring a full time customer/team support role and content/community manager with the aim of them starting ahead of this summer. Watch out for applications soon.

We’re looking for a freelance UX/UI designer 📱 to work on enrolment.

It feels like we might 🤞 finally be coming to the end of the post-COVID turbulence in the event world. Inflation on some things, like toilets, was over 80% for a while!!

Investments we started making in 21/22 started to pay off with much happier campers this year ❤️. We made some big moves to hire an in-house operations team and to build infrastructure. This included moving away from agencies and freelancers, and creating new paths, tracks, and fields. It was a tough process but we’re glad we did it.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ As a result 2023 had the highest rate of Veterans choosing to return and saw our reviews grow from average 4 stars to 4.5 stars across the board ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

We booked a really exciting headliner for Camp Kindling this year... then couldn't stop playing them in the office so decided to book them for Camp Wildfire too 🤣.

We are not increasing the Camp Wildfire capacity at all this year. It’s driving enough revenue for most of the ideas now and we want to focus on refining the experience.

Camp Kindling is growing slightly, with capacity for an extra 250 families. This growth should give us some extra funds for new ideas and improvements.

For the first time in 6 years, we added a new accommodation type with an en-suite toilet and shower 🏕️+🛁 which is frequently requested! Weirdly, we have sold loads of these for CW2 and zero for CW1 so far 🤷🏼‍♀️. It's not perfect for families because it only comes in double or twin so we are still working on finding a solution there.

🤯 For the first time we sold over 50% of all tickets for 2024 before Christmas 🤯 this is super helpful for us in so many ways so thanks everyone for booking early . It looks like this year will sell out faster than ever (~march). This is nice for us as it gives reassurance and validation we are doing the right things, but it also allows us to spend less time on marketing and more time on delivering a better event 🥰

Our experiment with Basic Tickets 🎟️ didn’t work. Most people with one ended up spending more money than necessary and would have had better value with Elementary, so we won’t be offering those again. We learned that we need to get better at communicating the value of the Elementary/Standard packages. The credit system can be hard to understand for first-timers. So, we will be working on this.

🌱 The grass finally grew on new field after 2 years of waiting and campers loved the new layout which was a MASSIVE relief 🌱

Some cool stories came out of the community this year. The team favourite was how everyone rallied to help someone attend camp and ended up raising a load of money for charity 💜

We experimented with some digital community building last year with the Patrol Playoffs 🏆 in the build up to the events. We want to do more of this kind of stuff, but are struggling with capacity until we have some more hands available.

We’re going to create a new Patrol Leader application process this year as so many people want to be one; look out for it towards the end of Q1.

We started as a festival and for the past 10-years that has been our absolute focus, but from that event came an incredible community. Now that we have a bigger team we hope to be able to find more ways to bring the community together (cough Winter Wildfire 😏).

Building a "Wildkind Brain" 🧠 to move all the knowledge out of Lee and Jules' brains 🧠🧠. Creating well-architected knowledge management systems is a big project. It's an important foundation that will allow the team to operate autonomously. It will also make everything much tidier and more efficient (neither of which are our personal strengths!) .

We want to spend less money 💸 with Meta/TikTok/Google to communicate with our community. This way, we'll have more funds to create fun stuff for you.

We are building a new Customer Service framework and tech stack 👩‍💻🧑‍💻. This will improve our response times, solution times, and allow more personalised support 💌.

Trying to find a venue that is capable of hosting Winter Wildfire has proven tricky. Tobacco Dock in London is an option but very expensive. If you know of an atmospheric venue that can hold 2000+ people and has lots of small rooms for activities please let laura.knott@wildkind.co.uk know. (It doesn’t have to be in London)

Adding a new stage, near the campfire, to host singer songwriters, campfire stories, soul/blues/country/folk 🔥🎸

How we can improve the initiations as the first part of the community getting together.

Is the hot air balloon a sensible investment? 🎈 It costs so much money and is so temperamental. Should we spend the money on something that can cope with more people and is more reliable? It is cool when it works though!

☀️ After such an intense work schedule over the summer, the team finds winter difficult. The post festival blues hit hard, everyone feels tired and the daylight in London takes its toll. To help with this, we’re experimenting with a remote work period. Allowing everyone stay inspired and get the summer they missed out on by working whilst travelling. We currently have team members in India 🇮🇳 South Africa 🇿🇦 and Argentina 🇦🇷

Knotty pointed out that 2025 will be our tenth anniversary 😮😮😮 We are gathering ideas for a whole year of celebrations with you 🎉

What investments we can make over a few years that are more exciting than tracks and paths! Can we rebuild the Zip Wire from year 1 but even longer? Can we build a swimming lake next to the forest? No idea if these things are possible or not but it all has to start with a dream so we’re exploring everything no matter how silly it seems 🦄