By Noah Stein
In case you haven’t heard, we have a new member of our Camp family, Sunny Simon Olive, whose parents are Maggie Olive, and Associate Director Louis Olive! We’re all so excited for them and can’t wait to meet Sunny up at Camp this summer.
One of the cool byproducts of Louis being out on paternity leave has been that all of us in the winter office have had a chance to try out aspects of his role. Louis carries a lot on his plate. Among his many responsibilities, he hires all of our staff, manages the staff onboarding process, and ensures that our program is ready to go for summer from a planning, equipment, and personnel perspective… and, of course, he oversees our social media.
If you follow us online, you know that Louis is really good at it. He has a knack for posting content that engages current families, showcases Camp to prospective families, and stirs up some potent nostalgia for camp alumni, all at once.
A couple months ago we sat down in an office meeting to plan for Louis’s leave and to divide up his responsibilities. I went into that meeting with three goals:
- Make sure the distribution was equitable
- Ensure everyone had the capacity to take on more
- Under no circumstances would I be the one to take over social media!
Don’t get me wrong, I know a little bit about social media. I am a millennial afterall. I know my Face Grams and Insta Books. I can tell a Reel from a Reddit. Tik Tok? Please. I was grooving to the Numa Numa song on YouTube in 2005. But professional marketing experience? A deep understanding of trending memes? As much as I’d love to say yes… definitely not. The thought of taking the social media reins felt daunting. Surely someone else would volunteer.
Needless to say– though Larry expressed SUBSTANTIAL interest in taking on the task (this is funny if you know Larry)– by the end of the meeting I had been anointed the interim social media manager.
When the time came to make my first post, my mind was flooded with questions:
Would the posts get any likes?
Would people appreciate the content?
And philosophically, should an institution that believes– based on substantial evidence– that social media can have detrimental developmental effects on young people, and that it is imperative that places exist without social media, screens, and a myriad of other potentially harmful technologies, even have social media to begin with?
With all of these questions swirling, I logged on to Camp’s Instagram account. The first thing I noticed was Louis’s last post: a meme-filled Valentine’s Day masterpiece. Recognizing then that I would never rise to Louis’s level of social media mastery, I decided to keep it simple.
What’s something just about everyone loves?
Boom. Cabin Cookout!
I went digging through our photo archives from last summer searching for some cookout photos.
As I sifted through them, something shifted. All of these photos, I realized, carry the power to transport us back to summertime at Camp Nebagamon, to place us back in a cherished time of our lives that in the dead of winter can feel lightyears away.
The next day was a Sunday, so naturally I wanted to share some council fire content. I dove deeper into our photo archives (which go all the way back to our first summer, 1929) and found countless photos of the Council Fire Ring, posting them to our story year by year.
Over the next few days I posted content incorporating contemporary photos along with photos from summers past, drawing out the consistency of the place over the years: races to the H-dock, scenes of the iconic “waterfront tree,” smiles! Snapshots that our whole community would appreciate.
Eventually I actually started to enjoy it. (I do not need to hear about how the algorithm is designed to hijack my brain’s reward system, ensuring that I like it…I am well aware and choosing to ignore it, temporarily, for the good of the community). The search for the right photo is pretty fun. It feels like sitting in the Big House flipping through old albums… except I get to share my findings with thousands of people who love Camp.
Hearing from alumni in response to some posts has also been rewarding. One former camper was stunned that a picture of him from decades ago emerged on our social media. The photo, he explained, brought back memories of summertime and the lifelong friendships he’d forged at Camp Nebagamon. In response to a video highlighting our waterfront with a caption “There’s nothing quite like a sunny afternoon on the Camp Nebagamon waterfront,” one alum agreed: “Nope, there ain’t.” Following another video showcasing some more of our waterfront projects, a future member of our 2026 staff wrote, “this has me so excited!”
Would I rather be off of a screen, spending time with people outside? Obviously. (If you want to know how I really feel check out the article I wrote last May) But if duty calls for going on social media, at least I get to use a probably-evil power for good: bringing a bit of summertime to our community’s feeds.
I’m still early on in my tenure as interim social media manager, but the questions I had when I set out on this social media quest have already mostly settled themselves:
Would we get any likes?
It’s not about the likes, it’s about creating a feeling of connection to Camp. (Though let’s be honest, the likes will increase when Louis returns)
Would people appreciate the content?
It seems that any content that brings us back to the best place in the world will be appreciated.
And that philosophical question about whether we should have social media at all?
Why don’t we save that for another day.
Former co-director Adam Kaplan was in town recently, and while we were out to breakfast he reminded me that another former co-director of ours, Nardie Stein, referred to camp as a “friendship factory.” Having been a camper, counselor, family camper, and village director for a good deal of the past 47 years, I can report that despite domestic manufacturing’s decline during that time span, camp’s friendship factory has never been chugging along more strongly, three shifts a day.
And that’s a long way to encourage all of you to take the time and reach out to your camp friends just to say hi. Why not scan the list of news items below and congratulate someone on their accomplishment? A uniquely glorious quality I have found with camp friends is that whether it’s been 30 minutes, 30 days, or 30 years, camp friendships pick up right where they left off.
Each year, Camp Nebagamon and the Camp Nebagamon Scholarship Fund (CNSF) host bracket pools for the NCAA March Madness Men’s and Women’s basketball tournaments! For those who may be new to our Camp Family, 
This month’s birthdays include…
