AI Tools for Camp Professionals: Looka and Otter AI

Every camp has moments that require professional polish on a tight timeline. Maybe you're launching a new specialty program and need a logo by next week. Or you just finished a two-hour board meeting and realize nobody took notes. These are the kinds of problems that used to require hiring outside help or hoping someone on staff had hidden talents.

This week, I tested two AI tools that tackle very different challenges: Looka for brand design and Otter AI for meeting documentation. Both promise to handle tasks that traditionally required either specialized skills or significant time investment.

Looka: AI Logo and Brand Design

Looka is an AI-powered platform that creates logos and brand materials without requiring any design experience. You answer a few questions about your style preferences, pick some colors and symbols you like, and the AI generates dozens of logo options in seconds.

Pricing:

• Free to design (unlimited experimentation)

• Basic Logo Package: $20 one-time (single PNG file)

• Premium Logo Package: $65 one-time (multiple formats including vector files)

• Brand Kit Subscription: $96/year (300+ templates for business cards, social media, letterheads)

• Brand Kit Web Subscription: $129/year (adds a basic website builder)

How Camp Professionals Might Use It:

The obvious application is creating logos for new programs. Launching a leadership academy? A STEM specialty week? An adventure program? Instead of spending weeks going back and forth with a designer, you can have professional options within an hour.

But the Brand Kit subscription is where the real value shows up. Once you have a logo, Looka automatically generates matching business cards, social media graphics, email signatures, and letterheads. For camps that run multiple specialty programs or need to brand events throughout the year, having all those templates ready to customize could save significant time.

I tested it by creating a fictional "Camp Pinecone Adventure Program" logo. The process took about 15 minutes from start to finish. The AI asked me to pick existing logos I liked, choose colors, and select symbols. The results were genuinely usable, not the clip-art disasters you might expect from automated design.

Pros:

• No design skills required whatsoever

• Unlimited free experimentation before you pay anything

• The Brand Kit templates maintain consistency across all materials

• One-time logo purchase option if you don't need ongoing templates

• Full commercial ownership of your designs

Cons:

• Because it's template-based, you might occasionally see similar logos elsewhere

• The $65 premium package is necessary if you need vector files for printing on shirts or banners

• The website builder is very basic compared to dedicated platforms

Best For: Camp directors launching new programs, specialty camps needing quick branding, or anyone who needs professional design materials without the professional designer budget.

Otter AI: Meeting Notes That Write Themselves

Otter AI joins your video meetings and creates live transcriptions, summaries, and action items. It works with Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams, and it has a mobile app for recording in-person conversations.

Pricing:

• Free: 300 minutes/month, 30 minutes per conversation, basic features

• Pro: $8.33/user/month billed annually (1,200 minutes/month, 90-minute meetings)

• Business: $20/user/month billed annually (6,000 minutes/month, 4-hour meetings, admin features)

• Enterprise: Custom pricing

How Camp Professionals Might Use It:

Board meetings are the obvious application. Instead of one person frantically typing while trying to participate, Otter captures everything and generates a summary with action items identified. You get a searchable transcript you can reference later.

Parent conferences become documented automatically. When a parent asks "What did we discuss in our meeting last month?" you have an exact record rather than trying to reconstruct from memory or scribbled notes.

Staff meetings during pre-season could benefit too. Those orientation sessions where you cover policies, procedures, and expectations? Now you have a transcript that new hires can reference, and you can see exactly what was covered.

The AI Chat feature is genuinely useful. You can ask questions like "What action items were assigned to me?" or "What did we decide about the transportation schedule?" and get answers pulled directly from your meeting transcripts.

Pros:

• Real-time transcription so you can follow along during the meeting

• AI-generated summaries and action items save post-meeting work

• Searchable archive of all your meetings

• Mobile app for recording in-person conversations

• Integrates with Slack for sharing notes with your team

Cons:

• The free tier's 300 minutes runs out quickly if you have regular meetings

• Transcription accuracy drops with heavy accents or multiple speakers talking over each other

• Speaker identification can be inconsistent, especially in larger meetings

• Some users report concerns about privacy since it's processing your conversations

Best For: Camp directors with frequent board meetings, HR managers conducting interviews, or anyone who needs documented records of important conversations.

The Bottom Line

These tools solve very different problems but share a common thread: they handle tasks that used to require either hiring someone or developing skills you might not have time to develop.

Looka makes the most sense when you need professional branding quickly and affordably. The $65 premium logo package is genuinely competitive with what you'd pay a freelance designer, and you get results in an hour instead of weeks. If you regularly launch new programs or events that need their own visual identity, the $96/year Brand Kit subscription could pay for itself quickly.

Otter AI is worth considering if documentation is a pain point. The free tier is too limited for regular use, but the Pro plan at roughly $100/year could save significant time if you're in meetings regularly. The question is whether you're comfortable with an AI service processing your conversations.

Both tools are worth a free trial to see if they fit your workflow. Sometimes the best way to evaluate these things is to throw a real problem at them and see what happens.

About the Author

Matt Kaufman has spent 40 years in summer camp as a camper, counselor, and director, studying what makes people belong, grow, and thrive. He writes about intentional community, leadership, and the intersection of technology and human connection.

Connect with Matt:

• Instagram: @mattlovescamp

• LinkedIn: Matt Kaufman

• Website: ilove.camp

Books by Matt Kaufman:

• The Campfire Effect: How to Engineer Belonging in a Disconnected World (February 2026)

• The Summer Camp MBA: 50 Leadership Lessons from Camp to Career