Spotlight: Jason Toff, Product Manager at Google & co-founder of Camp PALS
Remember the summers you spent at Camp Wannapeelyo (you know, that lake you still don’t know how to pronounce…)? Did your camp counselors seem organized, well on schedule and overall on top of things? I didn’t think so. Keeping the kids in line is one thing, but organizing the counselors can be an entire challenge in its own. No one has more experience with this than Jason Toff, a co-founder of Camp PALS in Radnor, PA.
Camp PALS is a place for young adults with Down Syndrome and their peers to have an experience of a lifetime. Campers are paired one-to-one with volunteer counselors and spend the week on teams as they grow in independence and build new friendships. Jason, who is a Product Manager at Google by day, co-founded Camp PALS in 2004.
With 9 summers as a camp director under his belt, he’s quite aware of all the scheduling, planning and grueling organizational tasks necessary to make a camp run as smoothly as possible. A techy on the side, Jason built a communication system on top of Twilio for the staffers last summer but it wasn’t quite perfect. This year, he discovered SendHub. “Reminding staffers that the trip leaves in 30 minutes, or that a location has changed is so easy to do via text“ says Jason, especially considering that many changes are done last minute.
With over 150 staff members, this year’s Camp PALS was the biggest one yet and we’re excited that SendHub was able to help make the communication more clear & organized. “It’s extremely reliable and so easy to use - it was perfect for us”, says Jason. “It worked so well for our daily staff meeting reminders, scheduling updates, etc. - we had constant communication with them.” Not that any kids have gone missing, but in a worst case scenario, Jason noted that SendHub could be used to alert everyone of a missing child, item or other general announcements.
Fav tech gadget: calculator watch (picture below)
Fav part of SendHub: the reliability
Texting pet peeve: When people send super long texts that need 2 or 3 messages…
Fav prank call made: oh boy… back when I was a kid my friends & I called random people from the phonebook and said really stupid things. One time, the police called us back and told my parents. Needless to say, the prank calls ended that day…
To learn more about Camp PALS, or Jason, you can check out their website, and follow him. We hope you enjoyed our Spotlight, and if you (or your company) want to be featured, send us a txt or email and tell us how YOU use SendHub :)
Garrett & the SendHub Team
