Camping & High Adventure
Share a camping tip.
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LATEST POSTS
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By InquisitiveScouter · Posted
These two ideas go hand in hand. If you join a program only for what you get out of it, you are much less likely to give to the program. And, unless that attitude changes for adults (we kind of expect it for youth, don't we?), you will see the program wither. For example, so few adults in our area are willing to give up their second (or third) vacation of the year to take kids to the woods for a week. And when they do, they expect.... wait for it... a vacation! Same holds true for weekend camping. We have great difficulty in implementing the Patrol Method, in that patrols sometimes want to do their own activity over a weekend, but we just cannot get the adults required for two-deep to cover the number of patrols we have out doing things. Due to lack of adult volunteers, we often have to force them back together for a quasi-troop event. If we (collectively) are unable to deliver the promises of adventure that we have made, they leave, and rightfully so. Adventure = retention -
Your mention of retention decreasing has piqued my curiousity. I am curious if there is a chart which tracks retention? It would be interesting to see how this has changed over the many years similar to the gross membersip chart shared previously. -
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This chart is often shown and as far as I can tell quite accurate; however, there are lies, the truth, and statistics. The values not shown on this chart are critically important to understanding chart: Percent of population under 18yrs AND membership headcount as a percentage of total elgible youth. Scouting America has held steady at 2% of total elgible youth until about 3 years ago. Specifically retention has increasingly gone down. The organization knows how to recruit but units dont know how to retain. -
IMHO BSA made the classic error of while having good market share, they started worrying / focusing on how to attract even more market share and not considering how changes may affect current customers. However you may feel, there was a core constituency for the BSA. They had ownership in the program, felt a heavy tradition with the program. The organization still has never fully benchmarked why people join, why they stay, what do their customers want. BSA shattered that core group in the 70's with wholesale changes (remember ISP and skill awards for Scouting??), they tried to regroup, and then for the next 30 years (maybe 1982 - 2012) were like a small sailboat in a gale, just trying to follow the winds without a firm direction. The suits and other outside influences tore out the foundations. Not to mention the $1 Billion vanity project in West Virginia. They lost a lot of the tradition, a lot of experience, and many of those that had joined and had stayed active for many years. Scouting is more transactional now, if kids join they get X, as opposed to when kids joined many years ago they joined for fun and adventure. Admittedly all of society is now way more transactional, but BSA or Scouting America is more now about what YOU can get from the program and many time not what your GIVE to the program. Then there are the two main divides in the organization. Group A wants to build a program, go and do things, enrich youth, challenge them outside their comfort zones, these we call volunteers. Group B wants to keep status quo on the organizational structure and administration, the focus is preservation and keeping the paid jobs and kingdoms in place. The only scoreboard is money raised. This group we call professionals. In the end, whether Group A or Group B likes it, the BSA (dba as Scouting America) will become a much smaller organization, less professionals, and lesser societal impact. Maybe other groups will fill the void, maybe portions of Scouting will grow. However this shakes out it will not be what the National BSA's rosy growth projections shown at NAM or other meetings think.
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