Your Summer Holiday Clubs End. The Opportunity Doesn't.
Across the country, climbing centres are welcoming hundreds, sometimes thousands, of children through their doors this summer. Holiday clubs are full, HAF programmes are underway, and families everywhere are looking for activities that keep children active, entertained and trying something new. It's one of the busiest periods in the whole calendar.
Most centres are focused, rightly, on delivering a brilliant six weeks. But the ones that get the most out of summer are already thinking about what happens when it ends, because the real value of summer isn't the summer itself.
Summer clubs aren't the product. They're the introduction
Every child who comes through your door over the holidays is meeting your centre for the first time, and that first meeting is the start of a relationship rather than the whole of it. With the right follow-up, a summer visitor can become a weekly Kids' Club member, a regular family climber, a birthday party booking, and eventually an adult member in their own right.
If they come for one week and you never speak to them again, you've carried all the cost of getting them through the door without any of the long-term return. Summer is one of the few times of year new families actively come looking for you. What you do next decides whether that was a one-off or the beginning of something.
The real measure of a good summer isn't how many places you filled. It's how many of those families are still climbing with you in six months' time.
Sam's July Top Tip
A marketing perspective from Sam
The single biggest thing I see centres miss over summer is the follow-up. You spend weeks delivering a fantastic experience, the families love it, and then everyone goes quiet until the schools go back. By October, when you finally get round to promoting Kids' Clubs, those families have half-forgotten who you are.
It doesn't need to be complicated. A simple sequence of emails while you're still fresh in their minds, a thank you, a few photos where appropriate, and a clear invitation to what's next, does more for your autumn numbers than any amount of paid advertising in September. The work is worth doing now, while the good feeling is still there.
Two very different summer audiences
Before you plan any follow-up, it's worth being honest about who is actually in your building over the summer, because there are two distinct groups and they need to be treated very differently.
Your paid holiday-club families have already shown they'll invest in activities for their children. For this group, the conversion journey below is exactly right: keep in touch, make joining a Kids' Club easy, and give them a reason to come back in September.
Your HAF families are in a different position entirely. HAF exists precisely because these families can't easily afford paid holiday provision, so treating them as a sales funnel isn't just tone-deaf, it misreads the whole point of the scheme. The opportunity here isn't conversion, it's community. Delivering a brilliant HAF programme strengthens your relationship with the local authority, builds genuine goodwill, and gives you a community story worth telling. Get that distinction right and you look like a centre that understands its role in the community. Get it wrong and you look like one that doesn't.
Key insight
Holiday-club families are a conversion opportunity. HAF families are a community and PR opportunity. The two need completely different messages, and knowing which is which is half the job.
Build the follow-up before summer ends
For your paying holiday-club families, the goal is to make the next step feel obvious and easy while the experience is still fresh. Rather than scrambling in late August, set the journey up now so it runs while you're busy delivering.
A short, warm email sequence does most of the heavy lifting: a thank you, a few photos where it's appropriate, a friendly "here's what's next", and a clear invitation to your September Kids' Clubs or a beginner family session. A first session free or a small early-bird offer gives fence-sitters a reason to commit. Just as importantly, make joining frictionless. If your Kids' Clubs restart on the 7th of September, start talking about them in early August, because parents plan ahead and a waiting list creates its own quiet urgency. Have the booking links ready and answer the obvious questions before anyone has to ask them.
The community story you're not telling
This is the part most centres overlook, and it's where the HAF work really pays off. If you've supported hundreds of children this summer, delivered thousands of holiday-club sessions, provided HAF places for families who needed them, and introduced dozens of children to climbing for the very first time, that isn't just a busy diary. It's a genuine community story, and it's one very few centres bother to tell.
Local newspapers love stories about children staying active and fed over the holidays, especially where there's a HAF angle or a partnership with the local authority behind it. The same story makes excellent content for your own newsletter and for LinkedIn, positioning your centre as a real part of the local community rather than simply a place to climb. This is also where your social proof lives: real numbers, real families, real impact, told honestly.
If you supported 800 children and delivered 300 HAF places this summer, that's not a logistics update. That's proof of the role your centre plays in its community.
Don't let your own marketing go quiet
The irony of summer is that centres get so busy delivering it that their marketing disappears at exactly the moment they have the most to shout about. Keep the momentum going by celebrating what you've achieved so far, sharing what's coming next, promoting your September Kids' Clubs, highlighting family climbing sessions, and reminding your adult members that the centre is very much still open and thinking of them.
On social, resist the urge to simply post another gallery of holiday-club photos. Tell stories instead. Show a child's confidence growing across the week, celebrate the achievements, introduce the instructors behind them, and show parents what comes after the holiday club ends. Parents need to see the journey, not just the activity, because the journey is what they're deciding whether to join.
While everyone else is thinking about September, think about December
Here's the part we genuinely love. Most centres don't realise that enquiries for Christmas parties, school celebrations and corporate events often start landing while they're still in the thick of holiday clubs. The centres with the strongest Christmas season are rarely the ones who start planning it in November.
So while the summer systems are running, it's the ideal moment to get ahead: refresh your Christmas landing page, update the photography, reach out to previous corporate customers, prepare your festive packages, and line up the social content so you're ready the moment enquiries begin. A couple of quiet hours now saves a frantic scramble later and puts you in front of the families and businesses booking early.
A summer worth more than six weeks
Holiday clubs and HAF schemes are worth doing in their own right: they introduce children to climbing, keep them active over the break, and put your centre at the heart of the local community. The centres that get the most from all that effort are simply the ones who treat the last day of summer as a beginning rather than an end, and who put the follow-up in place before the schools go back.
Worth asking yourself
Of every family who came through your doors this summer, how many will you still be in touch with by Christmas? The answer is being decided right now, by what you do in the next few weeks.
Want help turning your summer into a stronger year?
If your holiday clubs are full but you're not sure how to turn all those new families into September members and a busy Christmas season, this is exactly the kind of thing I help centres with. Drop me a line and we'll take an honest look at your summer-to-autumn plan together. No pitch, just a genuine conversation about what's going on.
Sam Beeny, Marketing Manager, ClimbHQ