Liability can take many forms, and it is important for every business to take reasonable precautions to protect its interests in the event of either physical or emotional injury claims on the part of guests. Injuries of either type may often lead to claims for compensation and damages, even when the injuries are the result of reckless behavior on the part of a guest or the failure to follow posted rules and regulations. Businesses with greater inherent risks of injury must take greater precautions to protect themselves from the threat of lawsuits.

Campgrounds with greater inherent risks might include parks with ziplines, shooting ranges, river rafting, paintball fields, mountain biking, mechanical bulls, and climbing walls; however, every park has liabilities, and there are probably more personal injury attorneys within a 50-mile radius of your park than there are churches, schools, and hospitals combined.

Many campgrounds utilize blanket release forms known as crowd releases. Crowd release forms are generalized notifications that your guests are surrendering their reasonable rights to sue pursuant to their use and enjoyment of your park and its facilities, and they typically apply to the taking of photographs or videos. A crowd release will warn people that photography and filming may be ongoing at any time, that the images may be used in any and all media, in perpetuity, and that the guest consents to the use of his or her image without compensation by nature of entry; however, crowd releases rarely cross the line and attempt to cover the issues of physical liability. Crowd release forms also constitute rather weak defenses in a court of law.

If your park offers recreational amenities or activities with greater inherent risk, you will want to incorporate some very specifically detailed liability releases. There is no question that risky activities offer a great deal of appeal, particularly among younger guests, and can go a long way toward expanding a park’s customer base; however, it is necessary for your business to take reasonable measures to ensure the safety of its guests and to take measures to protect itself against lawsuits that may result if injuries are inflicted during the pursuit of those activities. Needless to say, the incorporation of these precautions should go hand-in-hand with the purchase of suitable liability insurance.

Downhill skiing and snowboarding are activities where participants assume a degree of risk. For years, the National Ski Areas Association has promoted a Responsibility Code that has attempted to shift responsibility for injuries upon skiers and snowboarders, not the ski area operators. The code advised users to ski in control, be able to stop at all times, avoid those downhill, yield to those uphill, not stop where they would obstruct a trail, utilize retention devices, observe signage, keep off closed terrain, and know in advance how to use lifts.

The Responsibility Code was a start, but the extensive text printed on the backs of most lift tickets these days is now designated as a “Ski Ticket Contract and Express Assumption of Risk”. The following text is typical and taken from the back of a recently issued lift ticket: “I accept and understand that skiing, snowboarding, and other forms of winter mountain sports are hazardous, with many inherent risks and resulting injuries or death. By my purchase and use of this ticket, I freely and willingly accept and voluntarily assume all risk of property damage, personal injury or death which results from my participation in winter sports activities and the inherent risks of such activities as they are defined herein.” This statement is followed by an extensive paragraph that itemizes those inherent risks, both natural and man-made.

One might think that this broad wording would release the business operator from almost all liability; however, the ski industry takes added measures to reduce the risks of injury, including the use of ski patrollers to open and close trails during the course of the day, sweep trails at the end of the day, and evacuate injured skiers from the slopes. Grooming, signage, the increased use of helmets, and improvements in the safety of equipment also help to reduce the likelihood of injuries. Despite all of these efforts to reduce liability, enforceability is never ironclad. In December 2014, the Oregon Supreme Court ruled that a season pass waiver was unenforceable, opening the way to a $21.5 million personal injury lawsuit, and this ruling has since been used to chip away at the overall validity of waivers and releases.

Bearing in mind the potential legal issues of enforceability, parks that provide higher risk amenities should follow the lead of not only the ski industry but also the amusement park industry, which routinely enforces height, weight and age restrictions, along with providing a long list of health conditions that should preclude participation. Those conditions typically include, but are not limited to, pulmonary problems, high blood pressure, cardiac disease, pregnancy, obesity, seizures, prior injuries, fear of heights, and psychological or psychiatric problems. Yes, that list covers just about everything. Health issues require a separate signed waiver.

When I enjoyed the use of a high ropes and zipline course recently, I signed both a written liability release and a health waiver. I was provided with copies of each, I was provided assistance in properly suiting up for the activity, and I was provided with basic instruction in the use of the equipment. In another recent outing, I visited a resort that operates mountain biking trails and a mountain coaster. At this facility, guests are directed to a row of computer kiosks where liability releases and health waivers are digitally signed before tickets may be purchased.

There are a number of companies that provide reasonably priced digital release services that work with either computer kiosks or mobile apps. These services save time, avoid the generation of a mountain of paperwork, are secure, offer cloud storage, provide analytical information, and can even integrate with email marketing programs as a means of generating return visits. Some services even allow seasonal businesses to adjust their subscription services between their peak season and off season. A few of the companies that you may want to look into include:

• Smartwaiver – https://www.smartwaiver.com/
• WaiverForever – https://www.waiverforever.com/
• WaiverElectronic – https://www.waiverelectronic.com/

Whether your park uses crowd releases, liability releases, health waivers, or a combination of all three, it is important to make every effort to protect its interests and to avoid the many catastrophic impacts of personal injury lawsuits.

If somebody asked you the name of the font used on your latest brochure or directory ad, would you be able to answer that question? In fact, if you paid somebody to design that advertising for your business, how long would it take that designer to identify the font? I actually encountered a situation about a year ago where a campground owner asked her website designer for the name of the font that was used as a substitute for a logo on her website. The website designer responded that she did not know, and that it was “just something that she thought looked nice.”

According to Thomas Phinney, the CEO of FontLab, there are perhaps 300,000 fonts in the world today, contained within about 60,000 font families (representing variations of a single font.) Those 300,000 fonts are not your biggest concern; however, the fonts that are used in your own advertising – from your website to print to signage to apparel – should all be singularly consistent. Fonts are one of the key components of branding, where “close enough” or “looking nice” is just not good enough to protect the integrity of your business.

There is only one font that represents such universally recognized brand names as Ford, Coca-Cola, AT&T, and Kleenex. For example, the font used in the Coca-Cola logo is called Spencerian script, a popular font in the United States from about 1850 to 1925, adapted by Coca-Cola in 1885 with special alternate character ligatures for the capital letters “C”. Needless to say, that font has shown some staying power! Also script based, the Kleenex logo is based upon the Montauk Pro Bold font, with proper kerning to connect the letters as if they were written with one continuous swipe of a marker.

Fonts such as these were not chosen randomly, even though we years later think of them as everyday acquaintances. The characteristics of various fonts trigger a series of predictable emotions – from strength and reliability and trustworthiness to modernity and cutting edge and fun. These fonts then go hand in hand with color, which is also anything but random. I still own sets of the old Pantone^® Process Color System swatch books that were the color reference standard in the days before the personal computer came into everyday usage. Those color values allowed designers to communicate color values with a consistency from one project to another, allowing for the matching of very specific colors on press. In theory, computers and monitors today can reproduce as many as 16.7 million colors, described as various combinations of red, green, and blue (RGB) color pixels. In practice, those colors are often difficult to share from one computer to another because identical colors may appear with considerable differences when viewed on two uncalibrated monitors.

Then there is the issue of the differences between the RGB (monitors) and CMYK (print) color spaces, which do not even come close to perfectly overlapping and translating from one to the other. Generally speaking, if colors are to be reproduced both online and in print, it is necessary to work in the CMYK color space, where the differences will be less pronounced when converting to RGB than when converting in the opposite direction. None of this is particularly easy, which is part of the rationalization for turning to experts for assistance. When you thought Kodak^®, you thought yellow and red, and when you think UPS^®, you think brown, but the world has gotten more complex. Fonts and colors are only two components that come into play in the design of an effective logo that will stand the test of time. (Keep Coca-Cola in mind as your long-term goal!)

You can design your own logo, use clipart, buy one online for $79.00, or find thousands of graphic design hobbyists who will design you a logo, of sorts, for $5.00 on fiverr.com. You will get what you pay for. Work with a single designer (it is not a competition!), expect multiple concepts and revisions, reject clip art, expect multiple formats including a vector file, and expect to pay a fair price. Ask yourself if that designer in Bangladesh or the Philippines has any understanding of the concept of camping.

Along with a logo, try to develop a tagline, something that is clever, not a cliché. It is almost not necessary to identify the companies associated with the following taglines, but I will disclose them at the end of this article if you happen to get stumped on one:

• Can You Hear Me Now?
• Where’s the Beef?
• When You Care Enough to Send the Very Best.
• Think Small.
• Just Do It.
• We Try Harder.
• You Deserve a Break Today.

Franchises from McDonald’s to Kampgrounds of America (KOA) recognize the importance of consistency in everything from fonts to colors to taglines, but you do not need to run a franchise business in order to think smart like one. Once you have established your branding, it needs to be used everywhere, without exception. This includes your signage, your building exteriors and interiors, and your apparel and branded merchandise. Branding is inherently not “generic” in any sense of the word. When there is a range full of cattle that all looks alike, you need to make your cattle stand out from the rest. It’s all about branding.

(Need help with matching the taglines with their corporate parents? Here you go: Verizon, Wendy’s, Hallmark, Volkswagen, Nike, Avis, and McDonald’s.)