Q&A with Casey Nitsch, Director of Advancement
Camp Happy Days is a South Carolina-based charity that makes the most out of its in-kind donation programs. The organization uses the donations of items off its extensive MyRegistry Gift List to deliver on its mission to offer support and encouragement to children diagnosed with cancer and their families. We sat down with Camp Happy Days’ Director of Advancement, Casey Nitsch, to learn more about the charity and how they tap into the power of in-kind donations.
Tell us about Camp Happy Days. How long has the charity been active? And what do you do?
Camp Happy Days is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, and in the summer of 2023, we will host our 40th camp. The organization started when a small group of volunteers got together and said, “Let's create a recreationally-focused camp experience for kids with cancer and their siblings.” Forty years later, that camp is still our flagship program. Every year, we run Camp Happy Days for a week at a camp in Summerton, South Carolina. The camp is completely staffed by volunteers.
Additionally, over the past 40 years, we've expanded beyond the camp to try to meet the needs of kids with cancer and their families in South Carolina throughout the year. Now we have holiday giving programs, teen weekends, family weekends, and we have regular one-day events for the younger kids. At a minimum, we're doing monthly events throughout the year. With the types of programs we run, our activities, the camp or our arts and sports programs, have a huge need for in-kind resources.
Can you elaborate? How does MyRegistry fit in?
When you think about all the stuff required for a weeklong camp - the food, the activities, the equipment needed to run camp, outdoor equipment, sports equipment, water coolers, water bottles, dishes, arts and crafts supplies, we try to get every bit of that in-kind and, hopefully, we do very little purchasing of those supplies. That's where the MyRegistry’s Gift List fits. We have a small staff and a huge need for in-kind donations. Using MyRegistry makes things substantially easier for us to select the items we need, share with our donors, and receive the items where it makes the most sense. We might send some items directly to the camp, or others might be needed in our brand new HQ and event center.
We had some specific needs for our in-kind donation tool. We wanted a platform that provided the donor information; for the camp team to have everything that they needed on one list; a list that was easy to use and share; and it had to be customizable and inviting for our donors. MyRegistry was the tool that brought all those things together in one place.
We can customize the Gift List so our donors know it is Camp Happy Days’ list and we get our donor’s information so we can thank them directly and build stronger relationships with them. We can add any item from any store we want. Sometimes we need some funky, hard-to-find stuff for camp. We also use an Amazon wish list, and MyRegistry enables us to sync with that list. Our donors still have access to the Amazon list, but every requested item is now all on one user-friendly interface. And, we only need to share one link!
What are some of the activities that use items that have been purchased off the Gift List?
Honestly, so many of our programs rely on the in-kind donations from the Gift List, but a special one is Annual Camp Prom. On the Thursday night of the camp, we decorate the gymnasium in classic prom style and all the kids get to choose a dress or a tuxedo T- shirt, which are super cute, and everybody goes to prom. The staff and adults at the camp dress up as well, it is so much fun. And most of the stuff needed for prom night – balloons, decorations, etc. - comes from donations off the Gift List.
In-kind donations make up a huge part of our budget. In-kind includes discounts and donations from vendors for our gala, or other events, for example, we got a free jump castle for a Halloween event. But nearly all the tangible goods, other than food, will typically come from the Gift List. We couldn’t do what we do without it.
Is there one “nice to have” with a MyRegistry Gift List?
If I must pick one, I’d pick the fact that we can choose where we want things to be shipped. For example, we've shipped stuff directly to camp, otherwise we pay for movers to take everything from our office. So, it's a cost savings and an advantage, especially at crunch time.
Also, until this year we didn’t exactly have a lot of space for storage. We moved into a purpose built building that, for the first time in our 40 years, has activity space for kids and families and administrative space for our offices. Our focus for fundraising was to help us make the building happen so we can serve more kids. When it came to outfitting the arts and crafts corner or the teaching kitchen, we got a lot of in-kind donations – not just the cabinets, the appliances, the shelving, but also all the magic markers, pencils, coloring books, notebooks, mixing bowls, spatulas. Every item that you could imagine for a fully stocked teaching kitchen, arts and crafts, or for our weekend camping trips, such as sleeping bags, sleeping pads, all of that is in-kind and so much of it came through the Gift List.