Camp lottery: ranked requests, the draw, and results

Use a camp lottery when families submit ranked week choices before enrollment is assigned.

When you create a lottery, Opens and Closes are times in your club's time zone, the same zone families see on their Camp page. The form says which one, for example "Times are in Pacific Time." Type the time you mean: 9:00 AM closes the window at 9 AM club time, whatever time zone your computer is in. Once the lottery exists, the Lottery tab shows the window as "Request window: ... to ...", with the zone shown after each time (for example 9:00 AM PDT), and shows when the draw ran in the same way.

Avoid the hour when the clocks change where your club is. A time in the hour that is skipped in spring does not exist, so the page uses a real time next to it, and a time in the hour that happens twice in autumn uses one of the two. The Lottery tab shows the time it saved, so check it there, or pick a time outside that hour.

Open the lottery, confirm the eligible requests and week capacities, then run the draw. Before it runs, the confirmation says how many requests there are, across how many weeks, for how many open seats. It counts requests and seats in weeks that someone asked for, and it doesn't add up households, because one household can rank several weeks. Review the results before sending offers. Each family receives the outcome and any payment deadline shown for its offer.

The draw needs the camp waiver to have real wording. While the waiver is still the placeholder a new club starts with, families can't be registered against it, so the draw stops before it does anything and says: publish the camp waiver at Agreements first. Every request stays waiting and the window stays closed. Publish the waiver, then run the draw.

A family needs an emergency contact on file to save lottery requests, and the camp page asks for it. Withdrawing from the lottery does not need one. The draw itself does not require one, so a request saved while the household had no contact still goes into the draw. The draw copies the household's emergency contact as it is on the day of the draw. The message after the draw says how many of the spots it gave out have no emergency contact on file, and each week's roster marks those campers. Ask those families to add one, or add it yourself with Edit intake on the roster.

When you close the request window, a request that a family is saving at that moment finishes first. Every request saved before the close goes into the draw, and no family can save one after it.

After the draw, use the registration and waitlist views to handle accepted, declined, or expired offers. Do not change capacity or request rules while you are reviewing a completed draw. See Camp and Program waitlists.

A family whose swimmers have not signed the season's camp waiver signs it when they save their requests. The waiver appears once, with the swimmers it covers named, and one agreement box ("I agree on behalf of the campers I've selected"). That records a signature for every ranked swimmer together, or none if anything goes wrong, and then saves the requests.

A few requests can be impossible to fill for a reason that is not capacity:

• the swimmer's camp waiver needs signing again, because a new version was published after the request window closed;

• the swimmer's birth date is after the week starts, which is almost always a mistyped year;

• someone closed the week after the request window closed;

• the family's account was paused or closed after they entered. The draw gives such a family no spot and no invoice, and the message names the household.

The draw still finishes and saves results, the spot goes to the next request, and the message after the draw says how many requests were affected and why. For the first two, and for a paused or closed account, the request goes onto the week's waitlist in draw order. A closed week takes no waitlist sign-ups, so a request for it is not on any waitlist.

Chase those families before the season starts: ask them to sign the current waiver, correct the birth date, or settle what paused the account, then offer them a spot from the waitlist.

If the draw stops with an error instead, nothing it did is kept: every request is still waiting and the window is still closed. Run the draw again. If it stops a second time, contact Swim Ops support.

The results email quotes the amount on the invoice that the draw raised for that spot. If the season's registration offering has price rules, that can be less or more than the week's own listed price, and the email always matches the bill. Those invoices are in the list All camp invoices opens, at the top of Camp.

It is the only email the draw sends: one per family (each adult on the account gets a copy), listing every spot won with its amount, the pay-by date and the lottery's cancellation terms. Families who won don't also get a separate "Camp registration confirmed" email for each spot.

If a family's results email fails to send, it is tried again automatically a few times, and only the adults who didn't get it are sent it again. Nobody gets it twice.

You can change what the results email says under Reach → Messages → Automatic emails, in the Camp group, on the page for Camp lottery results. It comes in two versions, each with its own box: one for a family that won at least one spot, and one for a family that won none and is on the waitlist. In each you can change the subject line, the heading and the Message (the opening), and add a closing. The result for each swimmer, in the order the family ranked the weeks, with the amount of any spot won, is filled in for you. So is the pay-by date, with the note that unpaid spots go to the waitlist after it, and the small print on how cancelling a lottery spot is credited. None of those can be removed. Use Preview on that page to see both versions before you save. See Automatic emails.

A household's waiting requests move to the household it is merged into, with the campers, so the family keeps its ranked choices and its place in the draw. Requests the draw already decided, and requests withdrawn, stay on the old household. The camp waiver the old household signed stays on its record and does not count as the surviving household's. A moved request still needs the surviving household's camp waiver for that camper when the draw runs: without it the request loses, goes to the waitlist, and the draw's result lists it as a request that could not be given a spot (see above). Ask the surviving household's adults to sign the camp waiver before the draw. A merge tried while the draw is running is refused with "being changed right now"; try again when the draw has finished. See Household ownership and merging.

If your club lets connected tools make changes, Claude or another connected tool can list your lotteries, create a lottery for a season as a draft, and open it, close it or put it back to a draft. Each of those waits for approval on the website, from the person who asked, because opening the request window lets families send ranked requests and stops first-come registration. Running the draw is never available to connected tools. Do it yourself on the website. See Camp for the rest of what a tool can ask for.

A family that cancels a spot the lottery gave them is not credited straight away. The credit is held until another family takes the spot and pays for it. The amount is fixed on the day they cancel (the schedule's share of what they paid, less the deposit). If you refunded that family's payment to their card after they cancelled, the credit is that fixed amount less what you already sent back, and it may be nothing. For example, with a $300 credit fixed and $200 refunded, the credit is $100, so the family gets $300 in total, not $400. A household is never given the same money twice. When a credit comes out smaller than it was fixed at, the treasurer gets a task that says so. If a refund you sent later fails, the treasurer gets a task too, because the family may now be owed the difference. If the second family's payment is returned by the bank before the credit is spent, the credit is taken back, and a refund of the first family's payment is allowed again.