Pine Forest Camp
A Summer Camp Case Study
1 million+ views, 88,000+ accounts reached, and leads roughly doubled by July. All in one summer.
Pine Forest Camp · Case Study
Key Growth Metrics
The first eight weeks of strategic content on Pine Forest Camp's Instagram account.
The Situation
Pine Forest Camp is a co-ed, full-season sleepaway camp in the Pocono Mountains, family-owned and operated for four generations by the Black family. The camp offers a classic, all-around experience: sports, arts, swimming, theater, outdoor adventures, and a beautiful lake. Families come back generation after generation because the traditions run deep and the friendships last a lifetime.
Pine Forest Camp knew new families mattered, but growth had always run on word of mouth, real and effective within that existing circle, with no clear way in for anyone outside it. The account was there for anyone to find, but nothing about it was built with a stranger in mind.
The account was built for people who already loved camp: familiar photos, captions that only made sense if you already knew who was in them or knew Pine Forest's own traditions. But a parent who'd never set foot on campus had little reason to stop scrolling. What wasn't coming through was the stuff a first-time family actually wants to know: the specific questions running through their heads, what happens during rest hour, who's in charge, what a regular day actually feels like, or how a first-time camper would fit in there.
The camp has four generations of family history behind it, plus traditions like opening week and the walk down to the lake, and Explorer Weekends built specifically for prospective families. That kind of continuity, the same family making the same kind of decisions for four generations, is what produces belonging, tradition, community, character, and growth, not a values slide anyone could write, but the accumulated result of decades of specific choices.
How we started working together
I'm a camp parent myself. My kids attend Black family camps, so when Pine Forest Camp reached out about their social media, I already understood the world I was stepping into.
The Strategy
Step one was the strategy itself: an audit of the existing account, a look at how comparable camps were using Instagram, and a content plan built around five pillars, the new camper experience, camp life and community, leadership and family ownership, alumni and legacy, and programs and registration, each built to speak to two audiences, the families who already know camp and the ones who haven't found it yet.
That strategy is what gave Pine Forest Camp the tools to actually tell its story to families who'd never heard of the camp before, alongside the kind of content their current families already needed and expected. We didn't change what they were doing. We added to it.
The second goal was making sure the person handling day-to-day posting had both a system to work from and strategic guidance to pull from every month. I created a Brand Brief, Caption Voice Samples pulled from the camp's own language, and a Hooks Library, along with a guide for using AI as a thinking partner. She can drop these documents into an AI assistant to get help making decisions. Every month, she also gets a plan that walks through what to post and why, built off the numbers and what's actually worked previously. She can hand the AI guide a few details from the week and work through the direction, the hook, and where a post should go, almost like thinking it out loud with someone who already knows the camp's voice. From there, she's the one choosing the visuals, writing the actual caption, and hitting post herself.
How this works, month to month
That system runs on a monthly cycle, not a one-time handoff. Pine Forest Camp is a monthly Strategy Partner client. Each month, I pull the Instagram analytics across the account, including reach, non-follower reach, profile visits, saves, shares, and more, along with which specific posts drove them, then read all of it against Pine Forest's brand voice and hooks library to figure out whether something worked. When something does, that's when it's worth digging into why, the style, the type of hook, so we can try to repeat it. The more we test, the more we can sense what actually works and what doesn't, and that shapes the plan for the month ahead. The person who posts day-to-day still posts the kind of content Pine Forest has always posted, the daily life and community moments families expect, with strategic pieces aimed at new families built in alongside it.
The account's Highlights, the saved story collections under the profile photo, went from a cluttered handful down to two, with the outdated ones cleared out and the text on the one that stayed updated to speak to a first-time visitor. The three pinned posts were reviewed and confirmed to each do a distinct job for someone new: introduce who Pine Forest is, give a clear next step, and show a real slice of camp energy. That's what makes the first impression intentional instead of accidental, and it's what turns a profile visit into a click to the website, and from there, into action.
The Results
By the end of the first month:
Reach: up 101% (62,966 accounts)
Profile visits: up 270% (12,000+)
New followers: +275
Four of the hooks I drafted into June's calendar were behind the month's strongest posts. One reel, reaching mostly people who'd never followed Pine Forest before, picked up 210 likes, 18 sends, and 6 saves, sends and saves are a stronger signal than reach alone, someone chose to pass it along or come back to it.
That pattern held all summer. By the eight-week mark, the account had crossed 1 million views, reached more than 88,000 accounts, and driven over 24,000 profile visits and 502 taps to the website. Followers were up 386, a 6.2% growth rate against a 2 to 3% industry standard.
Then came the hardest stretch of the year to post through: the final two weeks of camp, closing day, and the quiet weeks after. Closing day used the same caption structure as the year before and beat it on nearly every number: 509 likes against 446, 47 shares against 42, and 332 profile visits, more than any other post that month. Leadership visibility, an open item since June, finally landed too. A tribute post for one of the camp's co-directors pulled 606 likes and 57 comments, the most of any post that month, more even than closing day. A lighter, in-the-moment post from the other co-director got 296 likes, 23 comments, and 22 shares.
The best post of the month wasn't on any calendar. It was a set of tips for families whose campers were about to come home, built from an evergreen post Pine Forest recycles every year. It pulled 19 saves, more than triple anything else that month, and 42 shares, second only to closing day. As the team put it when they decided to post it, "Garin would love if we turned this into a post." They were right.
By the time the season wrapped, the account stood at 6,661 followers, and August alone, the slowest month of the year to post through, still brought in 401,193 views and 388 taps out to the website.
Leads moved too, roughly double this July compared to last July. The tracked lead source still points to the usual channels, camp reps, alumni, and friends. But the read from inside camp is that Pine Forest is appearing more often in those people's Instagram feeds now, keeping the camp top of mind in a way it wasn't before.
In their words
Our work is already reaching people outside the camp community, twice now. A director of admissions at an independent school saw the first-day-of-camp post and asked Anna directly who runs their social media. Another camp director who follows the account has told Anna how impressed she's been with it.
"Working with Garin has transformed how we approach social media at PFC. Her professional insight keeps us focused and intentional, helping us give our current camp families a genuine window into camp life while also connecting with prospective families who may not have discovered us otherwise. Garin gives us the confidence to show up as we are within a framework that just makes us better. She's a wonderful partner."
— Anna Black Morin, Executive Director, Pine Forest Camp